If in contrast a drunken wretch like Lacey with his wife and children
come in town on top of a wagon-load of shattered furniture, and all
are dumped down in a back alley to scramble into the shelter of a
tenement house as best they can, do you call upon them? Do you invite
them to your pew? Do you ever urge and encourage them to enter your
church? and do you make even one of its corners homelike and inviting?

I hope so; but, alas! that was not the general custom in Pushton, and
poor Mrs. Lacey had acquired the habit of staying at home, her
neighbors had become accustomed to call her husband a "dreadful man,"
and the family "very irreligious," and as the years passed they seemed
to be more and more left to themselves. Mr. Lacey had brought his wife
from a distant town where he had met and married her. She was a timid,
retiring woman, and time and kindness were needed to draw her out. But
no one had seemingly thought it worth while, and at the time our story
takes an interest in their affairs, there was a growing isolation.

All this had a very bad effect upon Arden. As he grew out of the
democracy of boyhood he met a certain social coldness and distance
which he learned to understand only too early, and soon returned this
treatment with increased coldness and aversion. Had it not been for
the influence of his mother and the books he read, he would have
inevitably fallen into low company. But he had promised his mother to
shun it. He saw its result in his father's conduct, and as he read,
and his mind matured, the narrow coarseness of such company became
repugnant. From time to time he was sorely tempted to leave the home
which his father made hateful in many respects, and try his fortunes
among strangers who would not associate him with a sot; but his love
for his mother kept him at her side, for he saw that her life was
bound up in him, and that he alone could protect her and his sister