During the last two months and a half since his return from Munich he had experienced greater happiness, had burned with a stronger zest for life than during the whole of his previous existence.  Not only had he been working at that which he believed he was fitted for, and which gave him the stimulus which, one way or another, is essential to all good work, but he had been thrown among people who were similarly employed, with whom he had this great common ground of kinship in ambition and aim.  No more were the days too long from being but half-filled with work with which he had no sympathy, and diversions that gave him no pleasure; none held sufficient hours for all that he wanted to put into it.  And in this busy atmosphere, where his own studies took so much of his time and energy, and where everybody else was in some way similarly employed, that dismal self-consciousness which so drearily looked on himself shuffling along through fruitless, uncongenial days was cracking off him as the chestnut husk cracks when the kernel within swells and ripens.

Apart from his work, the centre of his life was certainly the household of the Falbes, where the brother and sister lived with their mother.  She turned out to be in a rather remote manner “one of us,” and had about her, very faint and dim, like an antique lavender bag, the odour of Ashbridge.  She lived like the lilies of the field, without toiling or spinning, either literally or with the more figurative work of the mind; indeed, she can scarcely be said to have had any mind at all, for, as with drugs, she had sapped it away by a practically unremitting perusal of all the fiction that makes the average reader wonder why it was written.  In fact, she supplied the answer to that perplexing question, since it was clearly written for her.  She was not in the least excited by these tales, any more than the human race are excited by the oxygen in the air, but she could not live without them.  She subscribed to three lending libraries, which, by this time had probably learned her tastes, for if she ever by ill-chance embarked on a volume which ever so faintly adumbrated the realities of life, she instantly returned it, as she found it painful; and, naturally, she did not wish to be pained.  This did not, however, prevent her reading those that dealt with amiable young men who fell in love with amiable young women, and were for the moment sundered by red-haired adventuresses or black-haired moneylenders, for those she found not painful but powerful, and could often remember where she had got to in them, which otherwise was not usually the case.  She wore a good deal of lace, spoke in a tired voice, and must certainly have been of the type called “sweetly pretty” some quarter of a century ago.  She drank hot water with her meals, and continually reminded Michael of his own mother.