of administration in a school that must not be too manifestly impoverished, keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and rather a flutterer of dovecots—­with its method of manual training for example—­keeping up esprit de corps and the manliness of himself and every one about him, keeping up his affection for his faithful second wife and his complete forgetfulness of and indifference to that spirit of distracting impulse and insubordination away there in London, who had once been his delight and insurmountable difficulty.  “After my visits to her,” wrote Benham, “he would show by a hundred little expressions and poses and acts how intensely he wasn’t noting that anything of the sort had occurred.”

But one thing that from the outset the father seemed to have failed to keep up thoroughly was his intention to mould and dominate his son.

The advent of his boy had been a tremendous event in the reverend gentleman’s life.  It is not improbable that his disposition to monopolize the pride of this event contributed to the ultimate disruption of his family.  It left so few initiatives within the home to his wife.  He had been an early victim to that wave of philoprogenitive and educational enthusiasm which distinguished the closing decade of the nineteenth century.  He was full of plans in those days for the education of his boy, and the thought of the youngster played a large part in the series of complicated emotional crises with which he celebrated the departure of his wife, crises in which a number of old school and college friends very generously assisted—­spending weekends at Seagate for this purpose, and mingling tobacco, impassioned handclasps and suchlike consolation with much patient sympathetic listening to his carefully balanced analysis of his feelings.  He declared that his son was now his one living purpose in life, and he sketched out a scheme of moral and intellectual training that he subsequently embodied in five very stimulating and intimate articles for the school world, but never put into more than partial operation.

“I have read my father’s articles upon this subject,” wrote Benham, “and I am still perplexed to measure just what I owe to him.  Did he ever attempt this moral training he contemplated so freely?  I don’t think he did.  I know now, I knew then, that he had something in his mind. . . .  There were one or two special walks we had together, he invited me to accompany him with a certain portentousness, and we would go out pregnantly making superficial remarks about the school cricket and return, discussing botany, with nothing said.

“His heart failed him.

“Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out at me from the school pulpit.

“I think that my father did manage to convey to me his belief that there were these fine things, honour, high aims, nobilities.  If I did not get this belief from him then I do not know how I got it.  But it was as if he hinted at a treasure that had got very dusty in an attic, a treasure which he hadn’t himself been able to spend. . . .”