ool life and work, she could not
understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to
regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had felt
towards my father.

Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not think
he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness in
their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the half
ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, and
presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I wonder why
nearly all love-making has to be fraudulent. Afterwards he must have
disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after another of his
careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear. Her mind was fixed
and definite, she embodied all that confidence in 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 had dreams, 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 she dreamt 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 I think, too, she must have
seen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste," 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, his disposition 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