 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-humoured.) »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
