To trade upon this good-will is almost as low a thing as any man can do, even when he does it for good uses.

But to trade upon it, for the harm of those who feel it, and the ruin of his country, is without exception the very lowest--and this was what Caryl Carne was at.
He looked at the matter in a wholly different light, and would have stabbed any man who put it as above; for his sense of honour was as quick and hot as it was crooked and misguided.

His father had been a true Carne, of the old stamp--hot-blooded, headstrong, stubborn, wayward, narrow-minded, and often arrogant; but--to balance these faults and many others--truthful, generous, kind-hearted, affectionate, staunch to his friends, to his inferiors genial, loyal to his country, and respectful to religion.

And he might have done well, but for two sad evils--he took a burdened property, and he plunged into a bad marriage.
His wife, on the other hand, might have done well, if she had married almost anybody else.

But her nature was too like his own, with feminine vanity and caprice, French conceit, and the pride of noble birth--in the proudest age of nobility--hardening all her faults, and hammering the rivets of her strong self-will.