church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was

characteristic of the large mass of the English people-for after

all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass-in

early Victorian times. She haddreams, I suspect, of going to

church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a

large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a

little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top

trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince

Consort,-white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their

amiable progress. Perhaps shedreamt gently of much-belaced babies

and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical)

little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And Ithink, too, she

must haveseenherself ruling a seemly "home oftaste," with a

vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or

again, making preserves in the kitchen. My father's science-

teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of

prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, hisdisposition

towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a

clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes,

must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent

anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would

swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed

like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She

was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to

understand or tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her

standards, and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid

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