s used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point
of honor; and Mr. Wrench was one of the most irritable among them. He
did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was
somewhat tried on the occasion. He had to hear Mrs. Vincy say--

"Oh, Mr. Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so?-- To
go away, and never to come again! And my boy might have been stretched
a corpse!"

Mr. Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection,
and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard
Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.

"I'll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke," said the Mayor,
who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and how
broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes.-- "To let
fever get unawares into a house like this. There are some things that
ought to be actionable, and are not so-- that's my opinion."

But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being
instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate,
inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for "in point of fact,"
Mr. Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions,
which would not wear. He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he
afterwards wrote to decline further attendance in the case. The house
might be a good one, but Mr. Wrench was not going to truckle to anybody
on a professional matter. He reflected, with much probability on his
side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his
ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his
professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out
biting remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get
himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about
cures was never got up by sound practitioners.

This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could
desire. To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but
perilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the
weather-prophet. He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst
which all work must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself
as much as Mr. Wrench could wish, by an unprofessional openness.

However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and
the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch. Som