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 marked too high," was the other's invariable answer.
"William, you are a fool," his partner would rejoin for the hundredth time.

"Will you never understand that, if we get a little more than the customary profit upon one thing, we get less upon another?
You must make the thing even, or come to the workhouse." Thereto, for the hundredth time also, William Marston would reply: "That might hold, I daresay, Mr.Turnbull--I am not sure--if every customer always bought an article of each of the two sorts together; but I can't make it straight with my conscience that one customer should pay too much because I let another pay too little.

Besides, I am not at all sure that the general scale of profit is not set too high.