Liberty, glorious liberty, for my young friend's legs! Room, heaps of room, for that infant martyr's toes!" Mrs.Finch listened helplessly--lifted the baby's long petticoats, and looked at them--stared piteously at Nugent Dubourg--opened her lips to speak--and, thinking better of it, turned her watery eyes on her husband, appealing to _him_ to take the matter up.

Mr.Finch made another attempt to assert his dignity--a ponderously satirical attempt, this time.
"In offering your advice to my wife, Mr.Nugent," said the rector, "you must permit me to remark that it would have had more practical force if it had been the advice of a married man.

I beg to remind you----" "You beg to remind me that it is the advice of a bachelor?
Oh, come! that really won't do at this time of day.

Doctor Johnson settled that argument at once and for ever, a century since.

'Sir!' (he said to somebody of your way of thinking) 'you may scold your carpenter, when he has made a bad table, though you can't make a table yourself.' I say to you--'Mr.
Finch, you may point out a defect in a baby's petticoats, though you haven't got a baby yourself!' Doesn't that satisfy you?
All right! Take another illustration.