Would she have her will?  Clio would have thought her lecture had taken effect, and mayhap, it added something to the general temper of self-assertion, but in fact Cecil had little time to think, so thickly did gaieties and preparations crowd upon her.  It was the full glory and importance of the Member’s wife, her favourite ideal, but all the time her satisfaction was marred by secret heartache as she saw how wearily and formally her husband dragged through whatever fell to his lot, saw how jaded and depressed he looked, and heard him laugh his company laugh without any heart in it.  She thought it all his mother’s fault, and meant to make up for everything when she had him to herself.

Julius had his troubles.  When Rosamond found that races were what she called his pet aversion, she resisted with all her might.  Her home associations were all on fire again.  She would not condemn the pleasures she had shared with her parents, by abstinence from them, any more than she would deviate from Lady Rathforlane’s nursery management to please Mrs. Poynsett and Susan.  A bonnet, which Julius trusted never to see in church, was purchased in the face of his remark that every woman who carried her gay attire to the stand made herself an additional feather on the hook of evil.  At first she laughed, and then grew tearfully passionate in protests that nothing should induce her to let her brothers see what their own father did turned into a crime; and if they went without her to take care of them, and fell into mischief, whose fault would that be?

It was vain to hint that Tom was gone back to school, and Terry cared more for the Olympic dust than that of Backsworth.  She had persuaded herself that his absence would be high treason to her father, whom she respected far more at a distance than when she had been struggling with his ramshackle, easy-going ways.  Even now, she was remonstrating with him about poor Terry’s present misery.  His last half year had been spent under the head-master, who had cultivated his historical and poetical intelligence, whereas Mr. Driver was nothing but an able crammer; and the moment the lad became interested and diverged from routine, he was choked off because such things would not ‘tell.’  If the ‘coach’ had any enthusiasm it was for mathematics, and thitherwards Terry’s brain was undeveloped.  With misplaced ingenuity, he argued that sums came right by chance and that Euclid was best learnt by heart, for ’the pictures’ simply confused him; and when Julius, amazed at finding so clever a boy in the novel position of dunce, tried to find out what he did know of arithmetic, his ignorance and inappreciation were so unfathomable that Julius doubted whether the power or the will was at fault.  At any rate he was wretched in the present, and dismal as to the future, and looked on his brother-in-law as in league with the oppressors for trying to rouse his sense of duty.

Remonstrance seemed blunted and ineffective everywhere.  When Herbert Bowater tried to reclaim Harry Hornblower into giving up his notorious comrades, he received the dogged reply, “Why should not a chap take his pleasure as well as you?” With the authority at once of clergyman and squire’s son, he said, “Harry, you forget yourself.  I am not going to discuss my occupations with you.”