which my mother's comfort was
concerned and her experience conclusive, for which he grudged a few
shillings, and was absolutely impenetrable by her persuasions and
representations. And I have known him waste pounds on things of the most
curious variety, foisted on him by advertising agents without knowledge,
trial, or rational ground of confidence. I suppose that persistency, a
glibber tongue than he himself possessed, a mass of printed rubbish
which always looks imposing to the unliterary, that primitive
combination of authoritativeness and hospitality which makes some men as
ready to say Yes to a stranger as they are to say No at home, and
perhaps some lack of moral courage, may account for it. I can clearly
remember how quaintly sheepish my father used to look after committing
some such folly, and how, after the first irrepressible fall of
countenance, my mother would have defended him against anybody else's
opinion, let alone her own. Young as I was I could feel that, and had a
pretty accurate estimate of the value of the moral lecture on faith in
one's fellow-creatures, which was an unfailing outward sign of my
father's inward conviction that he had been taken in by a rogue. I knew
too, well enough, that my mother's hasty and earnest Amen to this
discourse was an equally reliable token of her knowledge that my father
sorely needed defending, and some instinct made me aware also that my
father knew that this was so. That he knew that it was that tender
generosity towards one's beloved, in which so many of her sex so far
exceeds ours, and not an intellectual conviction of his wisdom, which
made her support what he had done, and that feeling this he felt
dissatisfied, and snapped at her accordingly.

The dislike my dear mother took to the notion of our going to Crayshaw's
only set seals to our fate, and the manner of her protests was not more
fortunate than the matter. She was timid and vacillating from wifely
habit, whilst motherly anxiety goaded her to be persistent and almost
irritable on the subject. Habitually regarding her own wishes and views
as worthless, she quoted the Woods at every turn of her arguments, which
was a mistake, for my father was sufficiently like the rest of his
neighbours not to cotton very warmly to people whose tastes,
experiences, and lines of thought were so much out of the common as
those of the ex-convict and his wife. Moreover, he had made up his mind,
and when one has done that, he is