mind blossomed with wonderful schemes for his education.  All that mental growth no doubt contributed greatly to Mr. Britling’s peculiar affection, and with it there interwove still tenderer and subtler elements, for the boy had a score of Mary’s traits.  But there were other things still more conspicuously ignored.  One silent factor in the slow widening of the breach between Edith and Mr. Britling was her cool estimate of her stepson.  She was steadfastly kind to this shock-headed, untidy little dreamer, he was extremely well cared for in her hands, she liked him and she was amused by him—­it is difficult to imagine what more Mr. Britling could have expected—­but it was as plain as daylight that she felt that this was not the child she would have cared to have borne.  It was quite preposterous and perfectly natural that this should seem to Mr. Britling to be unfair to Hugh.

Edith’s home was more prosperous than Mary’s; she brought her own money to it; the bringing up of her children was a far more efficient business than Mary’s instinctive proceedings.  Hugh had very nearly died in his first year of life; some summer infection had snatched at him; that had tied him to his father’s heart by a knot of fear; but no infection had ever come near Edith’s own nursery.  And it was Hugh that Mr. Britling had seen, small and green-faced and pitiful under an anaesthetic for some necessary small operation to his adenoids.  His younger children had never stabbed to Mr. Britling’s heart with any such pitifulness; they were not so thin-skinned as their elder brother, not so assailable by the little animosities of dust and germ.  And out of such things as this evolved a shapeless cloud of championship for Hugh.  Jealousies and suspicions are latent in every human relationship.  We go about the affairs of life pretending magnificently that they are not so, pretending to the generosities we desire.  And in all step-relationships jealousy and suspicion are not merely latent, they stir.

It was Mr. Britling’s case for Hugh that he was something exceptional, something exceptionally good, and that the peculiar need there was to take care of him was due to a delicacy of nerve and fibre that was ultimately a virtue.  The boy was quick, quick to hear, quick to move, very accurate in his swift way, he talked unusually soon, he began to sketch at an early age with an incurable roughness and a remarkable expressiveness.  That he was sometimes ungainly, often untidy, that he would become so mentally preoccupied as to be uncivil to people about him, that he caught any malaise that was going, was all a part of that.  The sense of Mrs. Britling’s unexpressed criticisms, the implied contrasts with the very jolly, very uninspired younger family, kept up a nervous desire in Mr. Britling for evidences and manifestations of Hugh’s quality.  Not always with happy results; it caused much mutual irritation, but not enough to prevent the growth of a real response on Hugh’s part to his father’s solicitude.  The youngster knew and felt that his father was his father just as certainly as he felt that Mrs. Britling was not his mother.  To his father he brought his successes and to his father he appealed.