at a disadvantage is
only an additional exasperation, especially if he happens to have been an object
of dislike beforehand. Country practitioners used to be an irritable species,
susceptible on the point of honour; and Mr. Wrench was one of the most irritable
among them. He did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was
somewhat tried on the occasion. He had to hear Mrs. Vincy say -
    »Oh, Mr. Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so? - To go
away, and never to come again! And my boy might have been stretched a corpse!«
    Mr. Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection, and
was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard Wrench come in,
and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.
    »I'll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke,« said the Mayor, who of
late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and now broadened himself
by putting his thumbs in his armholes. - »To let fever get unawares into a house
like this. There are some things that ought to be actionable, and are not so -
that's my opinion.«
    But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being
instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate, inwardly
considered him in need of instruction, for »in point of fact,« Mr. Wrench
afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions, which would not wear.
He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he afterwards wrote to decline further
attendance in the case. The house might be a good one, but Mr. Wrench was not
going to truckle to anybody on a professional matter. He reflected, with much
probability on his side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too,
and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his
professional brethren would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out biting
remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious
reputation with credulous people. That cant about cures was never got up by
sound practitioners.
    This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could desire. To
be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but perilous, and not more
enviable than the reputation of the weather-prophet. He was impatient of the
foolish expectations amidst which all work must be carried on, and