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.
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