carried away by his discourse. I believe two or three heads of families
in the neighbourhood gave their sons absolute liberty of choice in the
matter of their professions--and am not sure that they had not afterwards
considerable cause to regret having done so. The visitors, seeing
Theobald look shy and wholly unmoved by the exhibition of so much
consideration for his wishes, would remark to themselves that the boy
seemed hardly likely to be equal to his father and would set him down as
an unenthusiastic youth, who ought to have more life in him and be more
sensible of his advantages than he appeared to be.

No one believed in the righteousness of the whole transaction more firmly
than the boy himself; a sense of being ill at ease kept him silent, but
it was too profound and too much without break for him to become fully
alive to it, and come to an understanding with himself. He feared the
dark scowl which would come over his father's face upon the slightest
opposition. His father's violent threats, or coarse sneers, would not
have been taken _au serieux_ by a stronger boy, but Theobald was not a
strong boy, and rightly or wrongly, gave his father credit for being
quite ready to carry his threats into execution. Opposition had never
got him anything he wanted yet, nor indeed had yielding, for the matter
of that, unless he happened to want exactly what his father wanted for
him. If he had ever entertained thoughts of resistance, he had none now,
and the power to oppose was so completely lost for want of exercise that
hardly did the wish remain; there was nothing left save dull acquiescence
as of an ass crouched between two burdens. He may have had an
ill-defined sense of ideals that were not his actuals; he might
occasionally dream of himself as a soldier or a sailor far away in
foreign lands, or even as a farmer's boy upon the wolds, but there was
not enough in him for there to be any chance of his turning his dreams
into realities, and he drifted on with his stream, which was a slow, and,