“There ought to be a new valuation made from time to time,” said Sir James.  “Returns are very well occasionally, but I like a fair valuation.  What do you say, Cadwallader?”

“I agree with you.  If I were Brooke, I would choke the `Trumpet’ at once by getting Garth to make a new valuation of the farms, and giving him carte blanche about gates and repairs:  that’s my view of the political situation,” said the Rector, broadening himself by sticking his thumbs in his armholes, and laughing towards Mr. Brooke.

“That’s a showy sort of thing to do, you know,” said Mr. Brooke.  “But I should like you to tell me of another landlord who has distressed his tenants for arrears as little as I have.  I let the old tenants stay on.  I’m uncommonly easy, let me tell you, uncommonly easy.  I have my own ideas, and I take my stand on them, you know.  A man who does that is always charged with eccentricity, inconsistency, and that kind of thing.  When I change my line of action, I shall follow my own ideas.”

After that, Mr. Brooke remembered that there was a packet which he had omitted to send off from the Grange, and he bade everybody hurriedly good-by.

“I didn’t want to take a liberty with Brooke,” said Sir James; “I see he is nettled.  But as to what he says about old tenants, in point of fact no new tenant would take the farms on the present terms.”

“I have a notion that he will be brought round in time,” said the Rector.  “But you were pulling one way, Elinor, and we were pulling another.  You wanted to frighten him away from expense, and we want to frighten him into it.  Better let him try to be popular and see that his character as a landlord stands in his way.  I don’t think it signifies two straws about the `Pioneer,’ or Ladislaw, or Brooke’s speechifying to the Middlemarchers.  But it does signify about the parishioners in Tipton being comfortable.”

“Excuse me, it is you two who are on the wrong tack,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.  “You should have proved to him that he loses money by bad management, and then we should all have pulled together.  If you put him a-horseback on politics, I warn you of the consequences.  It was all very well to ride on sticks at home and call them ideas.”

CHAPTER XXXIX.

    “If, as I have, you also doe,
       Vertue attired in woman see,
     And dare love that, and say so too,
       And forget the He and She;

And if this love, though placed so,
From prophane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they doe, deride: 

Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did,
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.” 
—­DR. DONNE.

Sir James Chettam’s mind was not fruitful in devices, but his growing anxiety to “act on Brooke,” once brought close to his constant belief in Dorothea’s capacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a little plan; namely, to plead Celia’s indisposition as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way, after making her fully aware of the situation concerning the management of the estate.