wished her son to impose upon her when
it came to his taking any serious step in life. She asked for nothing
better, indeed, than to be able, when the time came, to bow the motherly
knee to him in homage, and she felt a little dread lest, in her flat
moments, a clerical son might sometimes rouse in her that sharp sense of
the ludicrous which is the enemy of all happy illusions.

Still, of course, the Elsmere proposal was one to be seriously
considered in its due time and place. Mrs. Elsmere only reflected that
it would certainly be better to say nothing of it to Robert until he
should be at college. His impressionable temperament, and the power he
had occasionally shown of absorbing himself in a subject till it
produced in him a fit of intense continuous brooding, unfavourable to
health and nervous energy, all warned her not to supply him, at a period
of rapid mental and bodily growth, with any fresh stimulus to the sense
of responsibility. As a boy, he had always shown himself religiously
susceptible to a certain extent, and his mother's religious likes and
dislikes had invariably found in him a blind and chivalrous support. He
was content to be with her, to worship with her, and to feel that no
reluctance or resistance divided his heart from hers. But there had been
nothing specially noteworthy or precocious about his religious
development, and at sixteen or seventeen, in spite of his affectionate
compliance, and his natural reverence for all persons and beliefs in
authority, his mother was perfectly aware that many other things in his
life were more real to him than religion. And on this point, at any
rate, she was certainly not the person to force him.

He was such a schoolboy as a discerning master delights in--keen about
everything, bright, docile, popular, excellent at games. He was in the
sixth, moreover, as soon as his age allowed: that is to say, as soon as
he was sixteen; and his pride in everything connected with the great
body in which he had already a marked and important place was unbounded.
Very early in his school career the literary instincts, which had
always been present in him, and which his mother had largely helped to
develop by her own restless imaginative ways of approaching life and the
world, made themselves felt with considerable force. Some time before
his cousin's letter arrived, he had been taken with a craze for English
poetry, and, but for the corrective influence of a favourite tutor w