perating 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.

His library, though for the most part the purchase of late years,
contained books which reminded him of every period of his life. Up
yonder, on the top shelf, were two score volumes which had belonged to
his father, the share that fell to him when he and his sister made the
ordained division: scientific treatises out of date, an old magazine,
old books of travel. Strange that, in his times of folly, he had not
sold these as burdensome rubbish; he was very glad now, when love and
reverence for things gone by began to take hold upon him. There, at the
same height, stood a rank of school-books