“Casaubon won’t like that,” said the Rector.

“There is some foreign blood in Ladislaw,” returned Sir James.  “I hope he won’t go into extreme opinions and carry Brooke on.”

“Oh, he’s a dangerous young sprig, that Mr. Ladislaw,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, “with his opera songs and his ready tongue.  A sort of Byronic hero—­an amorous conspirator, it strikes me.  And Thomas Aquinas is not fond of him.  I could see that, the day the picture was brought.”

“I don’t like to begin on the subject with Casaubon,” said Sir James.  “He has more right to interfere than I. But it’s a disagreeable affair all round.  What a character for anybody with decent connections to show himself in!—­one of those newspaper fellows!  You have only to look at Keck, who manages the `Trumpet.’  I saw him the other day with Hawley.  His writing is sound enough, I believe, but he’s such a low fellow, that I wished he had been on the wrong side.”

“What can you expect with these peddling Middlemarch papers?” said the Rector.  “I don’t suppose you could get a high style of man anywhere to be writing up interests he doesn’t really care about, and for pay that hardly keeps him in at elbows.”

“Exactly:  that makes it so annoying that Brooke should have put a man who has a sort of connection with the family in a position of that kind.  For my part, I think Ladislaw is rather a fool for accepting.”

“It is Aquinas’s fault,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.  “Why didn’t he use his interest to get Ladislaw made an attache or sent to India?  That is how families get rid of troublesome sprigs.”

“There is no knowing to what lengths the mischief may go,” said Sir James, anxiously.  “But if Casaubon says nothing, what can I do?”

“Oh my dear Sir James,” said the Rector, “don’t let us make too much of all this.  It is likely enough to end in mere smoke.  After a month or two Brooke and this Master Ladislaw will get tired of each other; Ladislaw will take wing; Brooke will sell the `Pioneer,’ and everything will settle down again as usual.”

“There is one good chance—­that he will not like to feel his money oozing away,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.  “If I knew the items of election expenses I could scare him.  It’s no use plying him with wide words like Expenditure:  I wouldn’t talk of phlebotomy, I would empty a pot of leeches upon him.  What we good stingy people don’t like, is having our sixpences sucked away from us.”

“And he will not like having things raked up against him,” said Sir James.  “There is the management of his estate.  They have begun upon that already.  And it really is painful for me to see.  It is a nuisance under one’s very nose.  I do think one is bound to do the best for one’s land and tenants, especially in these hard times.”

“Perhaps the `Trumpet’ may rouse him to make a change, and some good may come of it all,” said the Rector.  “I know I should be glad.  I should hear less grumbling when my tithe is paid.  I don’t know what I should do if there were not a modus in Tipton.”