Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-in-law, poured himself out a glass of water, and opened a sandwich-box.

“I cannot persuade you to adopt my regimen, Vincy?”

“No, no; I’ve no opinion of that system.  Life wants padding,” said Mr. Vincy, unable to omit his portable theory.  “However,” he went on, accenting the word, as if to dismiss all irrelevance, “what I came here to talk about was a little affair of my young scapegrace, Fred’s.”

“That is a subject on which you and I are likely to take quite as different views as on diet, Vincy.”

“I hope not this time.” (Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored.) “The fact is, it’s about a whim of old Featherstone’s.  Somebody has been cooking up a story out of spite, and telling it to the old man, to try to set him against Fred. He’s very fond of Fred, and is likely to do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good as told Fred that he means to leave him his land, and that makes other people jealous.”

“Vincy, I must repeat, that you will not get any concurrence from me as to the course you have pursued with your eldest son.  It was entirely from worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church:  with a family of three sons and four daughters, you were not warranted in devoting money to an expensive education which has succeeded in nothing but in giving him extravagant idle habits.  You are now reaping the consequences.”

To point out other people’s errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient.  When a man has the immediate prospect of being mayor, and is ready, in the interests of commerce, to take up a firm attitude on politics generally, he has naturally a sense of his importance to the framework of things which seems to throw questions of private conduct into the background.  And this particular reproof irritated him more than any other.  It was eminently superfluous to him to be told that he was reaping the consequences.  But he felt his neck under Bulstrode’s yoke; and though he usually enjoyed kicking, he was anxious to refrain from that relief.

“As to that, Bulstrode, it’s no use going back.  I’m not one of your pattern men, and I don’t pretend to be.  I couldn’t foresee everything in the trade; there wasn’t a finer business in Middlemarch than ours, and the lad was clever.  My poor brother was in the Church, and would have done well—­had got preferment already, but that stomach fever took him off:  else he might have been a dean by this time.  I think I was justified in what I tried to do for Fred. If you come to religion, it seems to me a man shouldn’t want to carve out his meat to an ounce beforehand:—­one must trust a little to Providence and be generous.  It’s a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little:  in my opinion, it’s a father’s duty to give his sons a fine chance.”

“I don’t wish to act otherwise than as your best friend, Vincy, when I say that what you have been uttering just now is one mass of worldliness and inconsistent folly.”