g to bring up her boy, and wished more earnestly than ever that
the responsibility had fallen into other hands than hers. There was
something so dreadfully uncanny about Austin. His ignorance about the
common facts of life was as extraordinary as his perfect familiarity
with matters known only to great scholars. His views and tastes were
strange to her, so strange as to be beyond her comprehension
altogether. She found herself unable to argue with him because their
minds were set on different planes, and her representations did not
seem to touch him in the very least. And yet, after all, he was a very
good boy, full of pure thoughts and kindly impulses and spiritual
intuitions and intellectual proclivities which certainly no moralist
would condemn. If only he were more practical, even more commonplace,
and wouldn't talk such nonsense! Then there would not be such a gulf
between them as there was at present; then she might have some
influence over him for good, at any rate. Her thoughts recurred,
uneasily, to the strange experiences of that morning. The mystery of
the raps distracted her, puzzled her, frightened her; whereas Austin
was not frightened at all--on the contrary, he accepted the whole
thing with the serenest cheerfulness and _sang-froid_, finding it
apparently quite natural that these unseen agencies, coming from
nobody knew where, should take him under their protection and make
friends with him. What could it all portend?

Of course it was very foolish of the good lady to fret like this
because Austin was so different from what she thought he should be.
She did not see that his nature was infinitely finer and subtler than
her own, and that it was no use in the world attempting to stifle his
intellectual growth and drag him down to her own level. A burly,
muscular boy, who played football and read 'Tom Brown,' would have
been far more to her taste, for such a one she would at least have
understood. But Austin, with his queer notions and audacious
paradoxes, was utterly beyond her. Unluckily, too, she had no sense of
humour, and instead of laughing at his occasionally preposterous
sallies, she allowed them to irritate and worry her. A person with no
sense of humour is handicapped from start to finish, and is as much to
be pitied as one born blind or deaf.

But Austin had his limitations too, and among them was a most
deplorable want of tact. Otherwise he would never have said, as he
was going to bed that nig