And so on in the same strain, until, in speaking of nearer matters, his style grew simpler.

’Our elder boy begins to put me in a difficulty.  As I told you, he has been brought up on the most orthodox lines of Anglicanism; his mother —­ best of mothers and best of wives, but in this respect atavistic —­ has had a free hand, and I don’t see how it could have been otherwise.  But now the lad begins to ask awkward questions, and to put me in a corner; the young rascal is a vigorous dialectician and rationalist —­ odd result of such training.  It becomes a serious question how I am to behave.  I cannot bear to distress his mother, yet how can I tell him that I literally believe those quaint old fables? Solvetur vivendo, of course, like everything else, but just now it worries me a little.  Generally I can see a pretty clear line of duty; here the duty is divided, with a vengeance.  Have you any counsel?’

Harvey Rolfe mumbled impatiently; all domestic matters were a trial to his nerves.  It seemed to him an act of unaccountable folly to marry a woman from whom one differed diametrically on subjects that lay at the root of life; and of children he could hardly bring himself to think at all, so exasperating the complication they introduced into social problems which defied common-sense.  He disliked children; fled the sight and the sound of them in most cases, and, when this was not possible, regarded them with apprehension, anxiety, weariness, anything but interest.  In the perplexity that had come upon him, Basil Morton seemed to have nothing more than his deserts.  ‘Best of mothers and of wives’, forsooth!  An excellent housekeeper, no doubt, but what shadow of qualification for wifehood and motherhood in this year 1886?  The whole question was disgusting to a rational man —­ especially to that vigorous example of the class, by name Harvey Rolfe.

Late as it was, he did not care to go to bed.  This morning he had brought home a batch of books from the London Library, and he began to turn them over, with the pleasure of anticipation.  Not seldom of late had Harvey flattered himself on the growth of intellectual gusto which proceeded in him together with a perceptible decline of baser appetites, so long his torment and his hindrance.  His age was now seven and thirty; at forty he might hope to have utterly trodden under foot the instincts at war with mental calm.  He saw before him long years of congenial fellowship, of bracing travel, of well-directed studiousness.  Let problems of sex and society go hang!  He had found a better way.

On looking back over his life, how improbable it seemed, this happy issue out of crudity, turbulence, lack of purpose, weakness, insincerity, ignorance.  First and foremost he had to thank good old Dr Harvey, of Greystone; then, his sister, sleeping in her grave under the old chimes she loved; then, surely himself, that seed of good within him which had survived all adverse influences —­ watched, surely, by his unconscious self, guarded long, and now deliberately nurtured.  Might he not think well of himself.