py," I persisted; "we are all happy."

He shook his head.

"I watch her," he said. "Women suffer more than we do. They live more
in the present. I see my hopes, but she--she sees only me, and I have
always been a failure. She has lost faith in me."

I could say nothing. I understood but dimly.

"That is why I want you to be an educated man, Paul," he continued after
a silence. "You can't think what a help education is to a man. I don't
mean it helps you to get on in the world; I think for that it rather
hampers you. But it helps you to bear adversity. To a man with a
well-stored mind, life is interesting on a piece of bread and a cup
of tea. I know. If it were not for you and your mother I should not
trouble."

And yet at that time our fortunes were at their brightest, so far as I
remember them; and when they were dark again he was full of fresh hope,
planning, scheming, dreaming again. It was never acting. A worse actor
never trod this stage on which we fret. His occasional attempts at a
cheerfulness he did not feel inevitably resulted in our all three crying
in one another's arms. No; it was only when things were going well
that experience came to his injury. Child of misfortune, he ever rose,
Antaeus-like, renewed in strength from contact with his mother.

Nor must it be understood that his despondent moods, even in time of
prosperity, were oft recurring. Generally speaking, as he himself said,
he was full of confidence. Already had he fixed upon our new house in
Guilford Street, then still a good residential quarter; while at the
same time, as he would explain to my mother, sufficiently central for
office purposes, close as it was to Lincoln and Grey's Inn and Bedford
Row, pavements long worn with the weary footsteps of the Law's sad
courtiers.

"Poplar," said my father, "has disappointed me. It seemed a good idea--a
rapidly rising district, singularly destitute of solicitors. It ought to
have turned out well, and yet somehow it hasn't."

"There have been a few come," my mother reminded him.

"Of a sort," admitted my father; "a criminal lawyer might gather
something of a practice here, I have no doubt. But for general work,
of course, you must be in a central position. Now, in Guilford Street
people will come to me."

"It should certainly be a pleasanter neighbourhood to live in," agreed
my mother.

"Later on," said my father, "in case I want the whole house for offices,
we could live ourselves in Rege