Both she and his father always encouraged old manners in him.  I think they took such pride in raising a peculiarly pale boy as a gardener does in getting a nice blanch on his celery, and so long as he was not absolutely sick, the graver he was the better.  He was a sensitive plant, a violet by a mossy stone, and all that sort of thing....

At the time I introduce Billy, both Lu and her husband were much changed.  They had gained a great deal in width of view and liberality of judgment.  They read Dickens, and Thackeray with avidity; went now and then to the opera; proposed to let Billy take a quarter at Dodworth’s; had statues in their parlor without any thought of shame at their lack of petticoats, and did multitudes of things which, in their early married life, they would have considered shocking....  They would greatly have liked to see Daniel shine in society.  Of his erudition they were proud even to worship.  The young man never had any business, and his father never seemed to think of giving him any, knowing, as Billy would say, that he had stamps enough to “see him through.”  If Daniel liked, his father would have endowed a professorship in some college and given him the chair; but that would have taken him away from his own room and the family physician.

Daniel knew how much his parents wished him to make a figure in the world, and only blamed himself for his failure, magnanimously forgetting that they had crushed out the faculties which enable a man to mint the small change of every-day society, in the exclusive cultivation of such as fit him for smelting its ponderous ingots.  With that merciful blindness which alone prevents all our lives from becoming a horror of nerveless self-reproach, his parents were equally unaware of their share in the harm done him, when they ascribed to a delicate organization the fact that, at an age when love runs riot in all healthy blood, he could not see a Balmoral without his cheeks rivalling the most vivid stripe in it.  They flattered themselves that he would outgrow his bashfulness; but Daniel had no such hope, and frequently confided in me that he thought he should never marry at all.

About two hours after Billy’s disappearance under his mother’s convoy, the defender of the oppressed returned to my room bearing the dog under his arm.  His cheeks shone with washing like a pair of waxy spitzenbergs, and other indignities had been offered him to the extent of the brush and comb.  He also had a whole jacket on....

Billy and I also obtained permission to go out together and be gone the entire afternoon.  We put Crab on a comfortable bed of rags in an old shoe-box, and then strolled hand-in-hand across that most delightful of New York breathing-places—­Stuyvesant Square.

“Uncle Teddy,” exclaimed Billy, with ardor, “I wish I could do something to show you how much I think of you for being so good to me.  I don’t know how.  Would it make you happy if I was to learn a hymn for you,—­a smashing big hymn—­six verses, long metre, and no grumbling?”