ad very nearly died in his
first year of life; some summer infection had snatched at him; that had
tied him to his father's heart by a knot of fear; but no infection had
ever come near Edith's own nursery. And it was Hugh that Mr. Britling
had seen, small and green-faced and pitiful under an anaesthetic for
some necessary small operation to his adenoids. His younger children had
never stabbed to Mr. Britling's heart with any such pitifulness; they
were not so thin-skinned as their elder brother, not so assailable by
the little animosities of dust and germ. And out of such things as this
evolved a shapeless cloud of championship for Hugh. Jealousies and
suspicions are latent in every human relationship. We go about the
affairs of life pretending magnificently that they are not so,
pretending to the generosities we desire. And in all step-relationships
jealousy and suspicion are not merely latent, they stir.

It was Mr. Britling's case for Hugh that he was something exceptional,
something exceptionally good, and that the peculiar need there was to
take care of him was due to a delicacy of nerve and fibre that was
ultimately a virtue. The boy was quick, quick to hear, quick to move,
very accurate in his swift way, he talked unusually soon, he began to
sketch at an early age with an incurable roughness and a remarkable
expressiveness. That he was sometimes ungainly, often untidy, that he
would become so mentally preoccupied as to be uncivil to people about
him, that he caught any malaise that was going, was all a part of that.
The sense of Mrs. Britling's unexpressed criticisms, the implied
contrasts with the very jolly, very uninspired younger family, kept up
a nervous desire in Mr. Britling for evidences and manifestations of
Hugh's quality. Not always with happy results; it caused much mutual
irritation, but not enough to prevent the growth of a real response on
Hugh's part to his father's solicitude. The youngster knew and felt that
his father was his father just as certainly as he felt that Mrs.
Britling was not his mother. To his father he brought his successes and
to his father he appealed.

But he brought his successes more readily than he brought his troubles.
So far as he himself was concerned he was disposed to take a humorous
view of the things that went wrong and didn't come off with him, but as
a "Tremendous Set-Down for the Proud Parent" they resisted humorous
treatment....

Now the trouble that he had bee