to me, much dominated by a young, plump, prolific, malingering wife;
a bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark man with flour in his hair and
eyelashes, in the lines of his face and the seams of his coat. I've
never had a chance to correct my early impression of him, and he still
remains an almost dreadful memory, a sort of caricature of incompetent
simplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the servile
tradition perfected. He had no pride in his person; fine clothes and
dressing up wasn't "for the likes of" him, so that he got his wife, who
was no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular intervals, and
let his nails become disagreeable to the fastidious eye; he had no pride
in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing
certain things and hard work. "Your uncle," said my mother--all grown-up
cousins were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class--"isn't
much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man." There
was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that
system of inversion. Another point of honour was to rise at or before
dawn, and then laboriously muddle about.

It was very distinctly impressed on my mind that the Good Hard-Working
Man would have thought it "fal-lallish" to own a pocket handkerchief.
Poor old Frapp--dirty and crushed by, product of, Bladesover's
magnificence! He made no fight against the world at all, he was
floundering in small debts that were not so small but that finally they
overwhelmed him, whenever there was occasion for any exertion his
wife fell back upon pains and her "condition," and God sent them many
children, most of whom died, and so, by their coming and going, gave a
double exercise in the virtues of submission.

Resignation to God's will was the common device of these people in
the face of every duty and every emergency. There were no books in the