as more easily
excitable, more readily carried away than the rest, weaker in
character. At eighteen he married a little factory girl, a pale,
plump, quiet thing with sly eyes and a wheedling voice, who
insinuated herself into him and bore him a child every year and
made a fool of him. When he had taken over the butchery
business, already a growing callousness to it, and a sort of
contempt made him neglectful of it. He drank, and was often to
be found in his public house blathering away as if he knew
everything, when in reality he was a noisy fool.

Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and
lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to
Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger,
remained at home.

The last child, Tom, was considerably younger than his
brothers, so had belonged rather to the company of his sisters.
He was his mother's favourite. She roused herself to
determination, and sent him forcibly away to a grammar-school in
Derby when he was twelve years old. He did not want to go, and
his father would have given way, but Mrs. Brangwen had set her
heart on it. Her slender, pretty, tightly-covered body, with
full skirts, was now the centre of resolution in the house, and
when she had once set upon anything, which was not often, the
family failed before her.

So Tom went to school, an unwilling failure from the first.
He believed his mother was right in decreeing school for him,
but he knew she was only right because she would not acknowledge
his constitution. He knew, with a child's deep, instinctive
foreknowledge of what is going to happen to him, that he would
cut a sorry figure at school. But he took the infliction as
inevitable, as if he were guilty of his own nature, as if his
being were wrong, and his mother's conception right. If he could
have been what he liked, he would have been that which his
mother fondly but deludedly hoped he was. He would have been
clever, and capable of becoming a gentleman. It was her
aspiration for him, therefore he knew it as the true aspiration
for any boy. But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,
as he told his mother very early, with regard to himself; much
to her mortification and chagrin.

When he got to school, he made a violent struggle against his
physical inability to study. He sat gripped, making himself pale
and ghastly in his effort to concentrate on the book, to take in
what he had to learn. But it w