‘Don’t you like Miss Trent, Mr. Ackroyd?’ Jack inquired, when they were left alone.  He was, as I have said, a sharp-eyed boy, and Luke could have given wonderful reports of his keenness of brain.  It is often thus.  The father has faculties which never ripen in himself, and which, as likely as not, cause him a life’s struggle and unrest; they come to maturity and efficiency in the son.  What more pathetic, rightly considered, than the story of those fathers whose lives are but a preparation for the richer lives of their sons?  Poor Bunce, fighting with his ignorance and his passions, unable to overcome either, obstinate in holding on to a half-truth, catching momentary glimpses of a far-away ideal—­what did it all mean, but that his boy should stand where he had been thrown, should see light where his eyes had striven vainly against the fog!  Perhaps there is compensation to the parent if he live to see the lad conquering; but what of those who fall into silence when all is still uncertain, when they recognise in their offspring an hereditary weakness and danger as often as a rare gleam of new promise?  One would bow reverently and sadly by the graves of such men.

It was a happy thought of Ackroyd’s to give the boy lessons in chemistry.  To teach is often the surest way of learning.  In explaining simple things, Luke often enough discovered for the first time his own ignorance.  In very fact, the greater part of the past two years had been spent by him in making discoveries of that nature —­long before he thought of new combinations of oleaginous matter.  By degrees he had come to suspect that, as regarded the employment of his leisure hours, he was very decidedly on the wrong track.  Curiously, for Ackroyd as well as for Bunce, there had arisen a measure of evil from Walter Egremont’s aspiring work.  Luke, though not to such a violent degree as Bunce, was led to offer opposition to everything savouring of idealism—­that is to say, of idealism as Egremont had presented it.  He had heard but one of Walter’s lectures, yet that was enough to realise for him the kind of thing which henceforth he disliked and distrusted.  Egremont, it seemed to him, had sought to make working men priggish and effeminate, whereas what they wanted was back-bone and consciousness of the bard facts of life.  Ackroyd had never cared much for literature proper; his intellectual progress was henceforth to be in the direction of hostility to literature.  When his various love difficulties ceased to absorb all his attention, he went back to his scientific books, and found that his appetite for such studies was keener than ever.  At length he converted his bedroom into a laboratory, resolved to pursue certain investigations seriously.  When his heart—­or diaphragm, or whatever else it may be—­left him at peace, his brain could work to sufficient purpose.  And of late he had worked most vigorously.  He ceased to trouble himself about politics, and religion, and social matters.  His views thereon, he declared, had undergone no change whatever, but he had no time to talk at present.