"I am well aware my opinion is of no value in your eyes, Richard; but
that does not absolve me from the duty of stating it: if you allow him
to go on as he is doing now, Walter will never eat bread of his own
earning!"

"There are many who do, and yet don't come to much!" half thought, but
nowise said the father.

"What do you mean to make of him?" persisted Miss Hancock, the
half-sister of his wife, the _a_ in whose name Walter said ought to have
been an _e_.

"Whatever he is able to make himself. He must have the main hand in it,
whatever it be," answered Mr. Colman.

"It is time twice over he had set about something! You let him go on
dawdling and dawdling without even making up his mind whether or not he
ought to do anything! Take my word for it, Richard, you'll have him on
your hands till the day of your death!"

The father did not reply that he could wish nothing better, that the
threat was more than he could hope for. He did not want to provoke his
sister-in-law, and he knew there was a shadow of reason in what she
said, though even perfect reason could not have sweetened the mode in
which she said it. Nothing could make up for the total absence of
sympathy in her utterance of any modicum of truth she was capable of
uttering. She was a very dusty woman, and never more dusty than when she
fought against dust as in a warfare worthy of all a woman's
energies--one who, because she had not a spark of Mary in her, imagined