He said this with a visible fire of conviction.

Tuckham stood bursting at the monstrousness of such a statement.

He condensed his indignant rejoinder to:  ‘Madness can’t go farther!’

‘There’s an idea in it,’ said Mr. Austin.

‘It’s an idea foaming at the mouth, then.’

’Perhaps it has no worse fault than that of not marching parallel with the truth,’ said Mr. Austin, smiling.  ’The party accusing in those terms . . . what do you say, Captain Beauchamp?—­supposing us to be pleading before a tribunal?’

Beauchamp admitted as much as that he had made the case gigantic, though he stuck to his charge against the Tory party.  And moreover:  the Tories-and the old Whigs, now Liberals, ranked under the heading of Tories—­ those Tories possessing and representing the wealth of the country, yet had not started one respectable journal that a lady could read through without offence to her, or a gentleman without disgust!  If there was not one English newspaper in existence independent of circulation and advertisements, and of the tricks to win them, the Tories were answerable for the vacancy.  They, being the rich who, if they chose, could set an example to our Press by subscribing to maintain a Journal superior to the flattering of vile appetites—­’all that nauseous matter,’ Beauchamp stretched his fingers at the sheets Colonel Halkett was holding, and which he had not read—­’those Tories,’ he bowed to the colonel, ’I’m afraid I must say you, sir, are answerable for it.’

‘I am very well satisfied with my paper,’ said the colonel.

Beauchamp sighed to himself.  ‘We choose to be satisfied,’ he said.  His pure and mighty dawn was in his thoughts:  the unborn light of a day denied to earth!

One of the doctors of Bevisham, visiting a sick maid of the house, trotted up the terrace to make his report to her master of the state of her health.  He hoped to pull her through with the aid of high feeding.  He alluded cursorily to a young girl living on the outskirts of the town, whom he had been called in to see at the eleventh hour, and had lost, owing to the lowering of his patient from a prescription of a vegetable diet by a certain Dr. Shrapnel.

That ever-explosive name precipitated Beauchamp to the front rank of the defence.

‘I happen to be staying with Dr. Shrapnel,’ he observed.  ’I don’t eat meat there because he doesn’t, and I am certain I take no harm by avoiding it.  I think vegetarianism a humaner system, and hope it may be wise.  I should like to set the poor practising it, for their own sakes; and I have half an opinion that it would be good for the rich—­if we are to condemn gluttony.’