evangelization. Lu and Mr. Lovegrove had no doubt that he would have
been greatly blessed if he could have stood it....

Both she and his father always encouraged old manners in him. I think
they took such pride in raising a peculiarly pale boy as a gardener
does in getting a nice blanch on his celery, and so long as he was
not absolutely sick, the graver he was the better. He was a sensitive
plant, a violet by a mossy stone, and all that sort of thing....

At the time I introduce Billy, both Lu and her husband were much
changed. They had gained a great deal in width of view and liberality
of judgment. They read Dickens and Thackeray with avidity; went now
and then to the opera; proposed to let Billy take a quarter at
Dodworth's; had statues in their parlor without any thought of shame
at their lack of petticoats, and did multitudes of things which, in
their early married life, they would have considered shocking. . . .
They would greatly have liked to see Daniel shine in society. Of his
erudition they were proud even to worship. The young man never had
any business, and his father never seemed to think of giving him any,
knowing, as Billy would say, that he had stamps enough to "see him
through." If Daniel liked, his father would have endowed a
professorship in some college and given him the chair; but that would
have taken him away from his own room and the family physician.

Daniel knew how much his parents wished him to make a figure in the
world, and only blamed himself for his failure, magnanimously
forgetting that they had crushed out the faculties which enable a man
to mint the small change of every-day society in the exclusive
cultivation of such as fit him for smelting its ponderous ingots.
With that merciful blindness which alone prevents all our lives from