I would also suggest that if your uncle and aunt had not been a couple
comme il-y-en a peu, it would neither have been excellent nor
glorious."

"Why, they are very well off," said Fred; "he is quite at the head of
his profession. The first thing a fellow asks me when he hears my name
is, if I belong to Langford the barrister."

"Yes, but he never would have been eminent, scarcely have had daily
bread, if he had not worked fearfully hard, so hard that without the
buoyant school-boy spirit, which can turn from the hardest toil like a
child to its play, his health could never have stood it."

"But then it has been success and triumph," said Fred; "one could work
like a galley-slave with encouragement, and never feel it drudgery."

"It was not all success at first," said his mother; "there was hard
work, and disappointment, and heavy sorrow too; but they knew how to
bear it, and to win through with it."

"And were they very poor?" asked Henrietta.

"Yes: but it was beautiful to see how she accommodated herself to it.
The house that once looked dingy and desolate, was very soon pretty and
cheerful, and the wirtschaft so well ordered and economical, that Aunt
Roger was struck dumb with admiration. I shall not forget Lady Susan's
visit the last morning we spent with her in London, how amazed she was
to find 'poor Beatrice' looking so bright and like herself, and how
little she guessed at her morning's work, the study of shirt-making,
and the copying out a review of her husband's, full of Greek