self-confidence, just too much and too fresh to allow him to
generalise with the unthinking assurance that was demanded of him. Yet
had anyone, he asked himself, more obstacles to overcome than he, in
his efforts to set himself free? This silent, undemonstrative father,
who surrounded himself with an unscalable wall of indifference; this
hard-faced, careworn mother, about whose mouth the years had traced
deep lines, and for whom, in the course of a single-handed battle with
life, the true reality had come to be success or failure in the
struggle for bread. What was art to them but an empty name, a pastime
for the drones and idlers of existence? How could he set up his
ambitions before them, to be bowled over like so many ninepins? When,
at length, after much heartburning and conscientious scrupling,
he was mastered by a healthier spirit of self-assertion, which made
him rebel against the uselessness of the conflict, and doggedly
resolve to put an end to it, he was only enabled to stand firm by
summoning to his aid all the strengthening egoism, which is latent in
every more or less artistic nature. To the mother, in her honest
narrowness, the son's choice of a calling which she held to be
unfitting, was something of a tragedy. She allowed no item of her duty
to escape her, and moved about the house as usual, sternly observant
of her daily task, but her lips were compressed to a thin line, and
her face reflected the anger that burnt in her heart, too deep for
speech. In the months that followed, Maurice learnt that the censure
hardest to meet is that which is never put into words, which refuses
to argue or discuss: he chafed inwardly against the unspoken
opposition that will not come out to be grappled with, and overthrown.
And, as he was only too keenly aware, there was more to be faced than
a mere determined aversion to the independence with which he had
struck out: there was, in the first place, a pardonably human sense of
aggrievedness that the eldest-born should cross their plans and