the like of ME; inasmuch as, going in our small way by experience and
observation, we depended not on a revelation, but on a little
tiresome process. Observation depended on opportunity, and where
should we be when opportunity failed?

One day she told me that as the novelist's life was so delightful and
during the good years at least such a comfortable support (she had
these staggering optimisms) she meant to train up her boy to follow
it. She took the ingenious view that it was a profession like
another and that therefore everything was to be gained by beginning
young and serving an apprenticeship. Moreover the education would be
less expensive than any other special course, inasmuch as she could
administer it herself. She didn't profess to keep a school, but she
could at least teach her own child. It was not that she was so very
clever, but (she confessed to me as if she were afraid I would laugh
at her) that HE was. I didn't laugh at her for that, for I thought
the boy sharp--I had seen him at sundry times. He was well grown and
good-looking and unabashed, and both he and his sister made me wonder
about their defunct papa, concerning whom the little I knew was that
he had been a clergyman. I explained them to myself by suppositions
and imputations possibly unjust to the departed; so little were they-
-superficially at least--the children of their mother. There used to
be, on an easel in her drawing-room, an enlarged photograph of her
husband, done by some horrible posthumous "process" and draped, as to
its florid frame, with a silken scarf, which testified to the candour
of Greville Fane's bad taste. It made him look like an unsuccessful
tragedian; but it was not a thing to trust. He may have been a
successful comedian. Of the two children the girl was the elder, and
struck me in all her younger years as singularly colourless. She was
only very long, like an undecipherable letter. It was not till Mrs.