art of
his burden was removed, and that even before the end of another year
his circumstances might be brought into a shape that would allow him to
think of marrying. It would always be a hard struggle with his mother,
he knew: she would be jealous of any wife he might choose, and she had
set her mind especially against Hetty--perhaps for no other reason than
that she suspected Hetty to be the woman he HAD chosen. It would never
do, he feared, for his mother to live in the same house with him when
he was married; and yet how hard she would think it if he asked her to
leave him! Yes, there was a great deal of pain to be gone through with
his mother, but it was a case in which he must make her feel that his
will was strong--it would be better for her in the end. For himself,
he would have liked that they should all live together till Seth was
married, and they might have built a bit themselves to the old house,
and made more room. He did not like "to part wi' th' lad": they had
hardly every been separated for more than a day since they were born.

But Adam had no sooner caught his imagination leaping forward in this
way--making arrangements for an uncertain future--than he checked
himself. "A pretty building I'm making, without either bricks or
timber. I'm up i' the garret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the
foundation." Whenever Adam was strongly convinced of any proposition, it
took the form of a principle in his mind: it was knowledge to be acted
on, as much as the knowledge that damp will cause rust. Perhaps here lay
the secret of the hardness he had accused himself of: he had too
little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen
consequences. Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough
patience and charity towards our stumbling, falling companions in the
long and changeful journey? And there is but one way in which a strong
determined soul can learn it--by getting his heart-strings bound
round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward
consequence of their error, but their inward suffering. That is a long
and hard lesson, and Adam had at present only learned the alphabet of it
in his father's sudden death, which, by annihilating in an instant all
that had stimulated his indignation, had sent a sudden rush of thought
and memory over what had claimed his pity and tenderness.

But it was Adam's strength, not its correlative hardness, that
influenced his meditation