tion would be permanent; he was always redeeming drunkards
who came before his magisterial bench; he was always trying to put
prostitutes into respectable places--and he was a perfect maniac about
children. I don't know how many ill-used people he did not pick up and
provide with careers--Leonora has told me, but I daresay she exaggerated
and the figure seems so preposterous that I will not put it down.
All these things, and the continuance of them seemed to him to be his
duty--along with impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy Scouts
and to provide prizes at cattle shows and antivivisection societies....

Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not continued.
They could not possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at that rate after the
money had gone to the Grand Duke's mistress. She put the rents back at
their old figures; discharged the drunkards from their homes, and sent
all the societies notice that they were to expect no more subscriptions.
To the children, she was more tender; nearly all of them she supported
till the age of apprenticeship or domestic service. You see, she was
childless herself.

She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to blame.
She had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family, and they had
forced upon her poor dear Edward without making the stipulation that
the children should be brought up as Catholics. And that, of course,
was spiritual death to Leonora. I have given you a wrong impression if
I have not made you see that Leonora was a woman of a strong, cold
conscience, like all English Catholics. (I cannot, myself, help
disliking this religion; there is always, at the bottom of my mind, in
spite of Leonora, the feeling of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman,
that filtered in upon me in the tranquility of the little old Friends'
Meeting House in Arch Street, Philadelphia.) So I do set down a good
deal of Leonora's mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case to the
peculiarly English form of her religion. Because, of course, the only
thing to have done for Edward would have been to let him sink down until
he became a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe, chance love
affairs upon the highways. He would have done so much less harm; he
would have been much less agonized too. At any rate, he would have
had fewer chances of ruining and of remorse. For Edward was great
at remorse. But Leonora's English Catholic conscience, her rigid
principles, her coldness, e