glass house--impossible to see with the eyes, or feel with the feelings
of a flower of the garden outside. Soaked in the best prejudices and
manners of his class, he lived a life no more shut off from the general
than was to be expected. Indeed, in some sort, as a man of facts and
common sense, he was fairly in touch with the opinion of the average
citizen. He was quite genuine when he said that he believed he knew what
the people wanted better than those who prated on the subject; and no
doubt he was right, for temperamentally he was nearer to them than their
own leaders, though he would not perhaps have liked to be told so. His
man-of-the-world, political shrewdness had been superimposed by life
on a nature whose prime strength was its practicality and lack of
imagination. It was his business to be efficient, but not strenuous, or
desirous of pushing ideas to their logical conclusions; to be neither
narrow nor puritanical, so long as the shell of 'good form' was
preserved intact; to be a liberal landlord up to the point of not
seriously damaging his interests; to be well-disposed towards the arts
until those arts revealed that which he had not before perceived; it was
his business to have light hands, steady eyes, iron nerves, and those
excellent manners that have no mannerisms. It was his nature to
be easy-going as a husband; indulgent as a father; careful and
straightforward as a politician; and as a man, addicted to pleasure, to
work, and to fresh air. He admired, and was fond of his wife, and had
never regretted his marriage. He had never perhaps regretted anything,
unless it were that he had not yet won the Derby, or quite succeeded in
getting his special strain of blue-ticked pointers to breed absolutely
true to type. His mother-in-law he respected, as one might respect a
principle.

There was indeed in the personality of that little old lady the
tremendous force of accumulated decision--the inherited assurance of one