The affection of these two persons was assailed by forces in comparison with which the changes that health or fortune or place introduce are as nothing.  It is a mournful satisfaction, but yet a satisfaction, that they were both of them able to obey the law which says that ties of close family relationship must be honoured and sustained.  Had it not been so, this story would never have been told.

The struggle began soon, yet of course it did not begin in early infancy.  But to familiarize my readers with the conditions of the two persons (which were unusual) and with the outlines of their temperaments (which were, perhaps innately, antagonistic), it is needful to open with some account of all that I can truly and independently recollect, as well as with some statements which are, as will be obvious, due to household tradition.

My parents were poor gentlefolks; not young; solitary, sensitive, and although they did not know it, proud.  They both belonged to what is called the Middle Class, and there was this further resemblance between them that they each descended from families which had been more than well-to-do in the eighteenth century, and had gradually sunken in fortune.  In both houses there had been a decay of energy which had led to decay in wealth.  In the case of my Father’s family it had been a slow decline; in that of my Mother’s, it had been rapid.  My maternal grandfather was born wealthy, and in the opening years of the nineteenth century, immediately after his marriage, he bought a little estate in North Wales, on the slopes of Snowdon.  Here he seems to have lived in a pretentious way, keeping a pack of hounds and entertaining on an extravagant scale.  He had a wife who encouraged him in this vivid life, and three children, my Mother and her two brothers.  His best trait was his devotion to the education of his children, in which he proclaimed himself a disciple of Rousseau.  But he can hardly have followed the teaching of ‘Emile’ very closely, since he employed tutors to teach his daughter, at an extremely early age, the very subjects which Rousseau forbade, such as history, literature and foreign languages.

My Mother was his special favourite, and his vanity did its best to make a bluestocking of her.  She read Greek, Latin and even a little Hebrew, and, what was more important, her mind was trained to be self-supporting.  But she was diametrically opposed in essential matters to her easy-going, luxurious and self-indulgent parents.  Reviewing her life in her thirtieth year, she remarked in some secret notes:  ’I cannot recollect the time when I did not love religion.’  She used a still more remarkable expression:  ’If I must date my conversion from my first wish and trial to be holy, I may go back to infancy; if I am to postpone it till after my last wilful sin, it is scarcely yet begun.’  The irregular pleasures of her parents’ life were deeply distasteful to her, as such were to many young persons in those days of