Ladies' Debating Club; but this new fancy of the Professor's was
simply one embodied laugh. It was, in other words, the smile of
relaxation at the end of a long day's toil: the flash of irony that
the laborious mind projects, irresistibly, over labour
conscientiously performed. The Professor had always been a hard
worker. If he was an indulgent friend to his ideas, he was also a
stern task-master to them. For, in addition to their other duties,
they had to support his family: to pay the butcher and baker, and
provide for Jack's schooling and Millicent's dresses. The
Professor's household was a modest one, yet it tasked his ideas to
keep it up to his wife's standard. Mrs. Linyard was not an exacting
wife, and she took enough pride in her husband's attainments to pay
for her honours by turning Millicent's dresses and darning Jack's
socks, and going to the College receptions year after year in the
same black silk with shiny seams. It consoled her to see an
occasional mention of Professor Linyard's remarkable monograph on
the Ethical Reactions of the Infusoria, or an allusion to his
investigations into the Unconscious Cerebration of the Amoeba.

Still there were moments when the healthy indifference of Jack and
Millicent reacted on the maternal sympathies; when Mrs. Linyard
would have made her husband a railway-director, if by this
transformation she might have increased her boy's allowance and
given her daughter a new hat, or a set of furs such as the other
girls were wearing. Of such moments of rebellion the Professor
himself was not wholly unconscious. He could not indeed understand
why any one should want a new hat; and as to an allowance, he had
had much less money at college than Jack, and had yet managed to buy
a microscope and collect a few "specimens"; while Jack was free from
such expensive tastes! But the Professor did not let his want of