Can any one explain this mystery? She was of a
much more vivacious, robust, and vigorous race than he was, for the
level of health among the Warrenders, like the level of being generally,
was low; but this lively, warm-blooded, energetic creature was swallowed
up in the dull current of the family life, and did not affect it at
all. She nursed them, ruled them, breathed her life into them, in vain:
they were their father's children,--they were Warrenders born.

This was not precisely the case with Theo, her only son. To him she
had transmitted something; not her energy and love of life, but rather
something of that exasperated impatience which was so often the temper
of her mind in later years, though suppressed by all the powers of
self-control she possessed, and modified, happily, by the versatility
of her nature, which could not brood and mope over one subject, however
deeply that might enter into her life. This impatience took in him the
form of a fastidious intolerance, a disposition to start aside at a touch,
to put up with nothing, to hear no reason even, when he was offended or
crossed. He was like a restive horse, whom the mere movement of a shadow,
much more the touch of a rein or the faintest vibration of a whip, sets
off in the wildest gallop of nervous self-will or self-assertion. The
horse, it is to be supposed, desires his own way as much as the man does
when he bolts or starts. Theo was in this respect wonderfully unlike the
strain of the Warrenders, but he was not on that account more like his
mother; and he had so much of the calm of the paternal blood in his
veins along with this unmanageableness that he was as contented as the
rest with the quiet of the home life, and so long as he was permitted to
shut himself up with his book wished for no distraction,--nay, disliked
it, and thought society and amusements an intolerable bore.

Thus it was the mother alone to whom the thought of change was pleasant.
A woman of forty-five in widow's weeds, who had just nursed her husband
through a long illness and lost him, and whose life since she was nineteen
had been spent in this quiet house among all these still surroundings,
amid the unchangeable traditions of rural life,--who could have ventured
to imagine the devouring impatience that was within her, the desire to
flee, to shake the dust off her feet, to leave her home and all her
associations, to get out into the world and breathe a larger air and be
free? So