Many did not like this mode of service; they would be helped to
buy; unequal to the task of making up their minds, they welcomed
any aid toward it; and therefore preferred Mr. Turnbull, who gave
them every imaginable and unimaginable assistance, groveling
before them like a man whose many gods came to him one after the
other to be worshiped; while Mr. Marston, the moment the thing he
presented was on the counter, shot straight up like a poplar in a
sudden calm, his visage bearing witness that his thought was
already far away--in heavenly places with his wife, or hovering
like a perplexed bee over some difficult passage in the New
Testament; Mary could have told which, for she knew the meaning
of every shadow that passed or lingered on his countenance.

His partner and his like-minded son despised him, as a matter of
course; his unbusiness-like habits, as they counted them, were
the constantly recurring theme of their scorn; and some of these
would doubtless have brought him the disapprobation of many a
business man of a moral development beyond that of Turnbull; but
Mary saw nothing in them which did not stamp her father the
superior of all other men she knew.

To mention one thing, which may serve as typical of the man: he
not unfrequently sold things under the price marked by his
partner. Against this breach of fealty to the firm Turnbull never
ceased to level his biggest guns of indignation and remonstrance,
though always without effect. He even lowered himself in his own
eyes so far as to quote Scripture like a canting dissenter, and
remind his partner of what came to a house divided against
itself. He did not see that the best thing for some houses must
be to come to pieces. "Well, but, Mr. Turnbull, I thought it was