boy? He denies the doctor has a right to cast him out of the world on
account of his having been the official to introduce him, and he'll only
consent to be visited when he happens to be as incapable of resisting as
upon their very first encounter.'

The doctor and death and marriage, I ventured to remind the captain, had
been riddled in this fashion by the whole army of humourists and their
echoes.

He and Julia fancied me cold to my father's merits. Fond as they were of
the squire, they declared war against him in private, they criticized
Janet, they thought my aunt Dorothy slightly wrong in making a secret of
her good deed: my father was the victim. Their unabated warmth consoled
me in the bitterest of seasons. He found a home with them at a time when
there would have been a battle at every step. The world soon knew that
my grandfather had cast me off, and with this foundation destroyed, the
entire fabric of the Grand Parade fell to the ground at once. The crash
was heavy. Jorian DeWitt said truly that what a man hates in adversity
is to see 'faces'; meaning that the humanity has gone out of them in
their curious observation of you under misfortune. You see neither
friends nor enemies. You are too sensitive for friends, and are blunted
against enemies. You see but the mask of faces: my father was sheltered
from that. Julia consulted his wishes in everything; she set traps to
catch his whims, and treated them as birds of paradise; she could submit
to have the toppling crumpled figure of a man, Bagenhope, his pensioner
and singular comforter, in her house. The little creature was fetched
out of his haunts in London purposely to soothe my father with
performances on his ancient clarionet, a most querulous plaintive
instrument in his discoursing, almost the length of himself; and she
endured the nightly sound of it in the guest's blue bedroom, heroically