ink how you can neglect him, when you know we
haven't got a shilling--why don't you go in and speak to him?"

"You can go if you like."

"I go!" cried Mrs. Iden. "I go!" in shrill accents of contempt. "I don't
care a button for all the lardy-cake lot! Let him keep his money. I'm as
good as he is any day. My family go about, and do some business----"

"_Your_ family," muttered Iden. "The Flammas!"

"Yes, _my_ family--as good as yours, I should think! What's your family
then, that you should be so grand? You're descended from a lardy-cake!"

"You be descended from a quart pot," said Iden.

This was an allusion to Mrs. Iden's grandfather, who had kept a small
wayside public. There was no disgrace in it, for he was a very
respectable man, and laid the foundation of his family's fortune, but it
drove Mrs. Iden into frenzy.

"You talk about a quart pot--_you_," she shrieked. "Why, your family
have drunk up thousands of pounds--you know they have. Where's the
Manor? they swilled it away. Where's Upper Court? they got it down their
throats. They built a house to drink in and nothing else. You know they
did. You told me yourself. The most disgraceful set of drunkards that
ever lived!"

"Your family don't drink, then, I suppose?" said Iden.

"Your lot's been drinking two hundred years--why, you're always talking
about it."

"Your family be as nervous as cats--see their hands shake in the
morning."

"They go to business in the City and do something; they don't mess about
planting rubbishing potatoes." Mrs. Iden was London born.

"A pretty mess they've made of their business, as shaky as their hands.
Fidgetty, miserable, nervous set they be."

"They're not stocks and stones like yours, anyhow, as stolid, and slow,
and stupid; why, you do nothing but sleep, sleep, sleep, and talk, talk,
talk. You've been talking with the lazy lot over at the stile, and
you've been talking with that old fool at the back door, and talking
with Jack Duck--and that's your second mug! You're descended from a
nasty, greasy lardy-cake! There!"

Iden snatched a piece of bread from the table and thrust it in one
pocket, flung open the oven-door, and put a baked apple in the other
pocket, and so marched out to eat what he could in quiet under a tree in
the fields.

In the oratory of abuse there is no resource so successful as raking up
the weaknesses of the opponent's family, especially when the parties are
married, for having gossiped with