s called upon to be.
Let him now declare it and hereafter for ever hold his peace.

"But there are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him. The
first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as
you. The second is that he has not, with all his faults, 'gone after
strange women.' You cannot think how a man's self-restraint is
rewarded in this. The third is that he has tried to love everything
alive: a dim preparation for loving you. And the fourth is--but no
words can express that. Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it
led me to you."

CHAPTER IX

A Long Engagement

GILBERT SYMPATHIZED WITH his future mother-in-law's anxiety at
Frances's engagement to "a self-opinionated scarecrow," but I doubt
if it at all quickly occurred to him that the basis of that anxiety
was the fact that he was earning only twenty-five shillings a week!
Frances herself, Lucian Oldershaw, and the rest of his friends
believed he was a genius with a great future and this belief they
tried to communicate to Frances's family. But even if they succeeded,
faith in the future did not pay dividends in a present income on
which to set up house. A widow, considering her daughter's future,
might well feel a little anxiety. But one can see wheels within
wheels of family conclaves and matters to perplex the simple which
drew another letter from Gilbert to Frances:

. . . It is a mystic and refreshing thought that I shall never
understand Bloggs.

That is the truth of it . . . that this remarkable family
atmosphere . . . this temperament with its changing moods and its
everlasting will, its divine trust in one's soul and its tremulous
speculations as to one's "future," its sensitiveness like a tempered
sword, vibrating but never broken: its patience that can wait for
Eternity and its impatience that cannot wait for tea: its power of
bearing huge calamities, and its queer little moods that even those
calamities can never overshadow or wipe out: its brusqueness that
always pleases and its over-tactfulness that sometimes wounds: its
terrific intensity of feeling, that sometimes paralyses the outsider
with conversational responsibility: its untranslatable humour of
courage and poverty and its unfathomed epics of past tragedy and
triumph--all this glorious confusion of family traits, which, in no
exaggerative sense, make the Gentiles come to your light and the folk
of t