knew better than herself what an easy prey to woman's wiles is a young
gentleman without experience. It was for this reason, as well as because
she loved to have her boy about her, that she had opposed Richard's
going to Midlandshire. She knew Carew too well to hope that he would
ever take into favor a son of hers, and she distrusted the country, with
its opportunities for ensnaring youth into matrimonial engagements.
Thirty years ago, in a fortnight of village life together, she would
have backed herself to have got a promise of marriage out of the Pope;
and she did not believe this to be one of the lost arts among young
persons of her sex.

Thus Mrs. Yorke had strained every nerve to get the necessary funds to
make town-life pleasant to her son, and yet she had not succeeded. It
was not so much that he found his allowance insufficient, for he had
various means of supplementing it, one of them (at which we have already
hinted) a strange one enough; but the wayward fit was on him that takes
so many of us in the early dawn of manhood; he was restless and eager
for change, and the lessons which his mother had caused him to receive
in landscape-painting furnished him with an excuse for wandering. She
had had him taught to sketch, because it was a likely sort of
accomplishment to aid the scheme of life which she had planned for him;
and he had taken up with the art more seriously than with any thing
else. But it was not in Richard's nature to apply himself with assiduity
to any pursuit. Such callings as lay within his means and opportunities
he was incapacitated for by education and temper. He could not have
occupied any subordinate position that required respectful
behavior--submission to the will of a master. He had had to put the
greatest restraint upon himself during his brief residence at Crompton,
and it was more than doubtful if he could have maintained his position
there as a dependent in any case. He was gentle and good-humored, genial