ath
nothing better than a frown. But as for Yeobright, when he looked
from the heights on his way he could not help indulging in a barbarous
satisfaction at observing that, in some of the attempts at reclamation
from the waste, tillage, after holding on for a year or two, had receded
again in despair, the ferns and furze-tufts stubbornly reasserting
themselves.

He descended into the valley, and soon reached his home at Blooms-End.
His mother was snipping dead leaves from the window-plants. She looked
up at him as if she did not understand the meaning of his long stay with
her; her face had worn that look for several days. He could perceive
that the curiosity which had been shown by the hair-cutting group
amounted in his mother to concern. But she had asked no question with
her lips, even when the arrival of his trunk suggested that he was not
going to leave her soon. Her silence besought an explanation of him more
loudly than words.

"I am not going back to Paris again, Mother," he said. "At least, in my
old capacity. I have given up the business."

Mrs. Yeobright turned in pained surprise. "I thought something was
amiss, because of the boxes. I wonder you did not tell me sooner."

"I ought to have done it. But I have been in doubt whether you would be
pleased with my plan. I was not quite clear on a few points myself. I am
going to take an entirely new course."

"I am astonished, Clym. How can you want to do better than you've been
doing?"

"Very easily. But I shall not do better in the way you mean; I suppose
it will be called doing worse. But I hate that business of mine, and I
want to do some worthy thing before I die. As a schoolmaster I think
to do it--a school-master to the poor and ignorant, to teach them what
nobody else will."

"After all the trouble that has been taken to give you a start, and when
there is nothing to do but to keep straight on towards affluence, you
say you will be a poor man's schoolmaster. Your fancies will be your
ruin, Clym."

Mrs. Yeobright spoke calmly, but the force of feeling behind the words
was but too apparent to one who knew her as well as her son did. He did
not answer. There was in his face that hopelessness of being understood
which comes when the objector is constitutionally beyond the reach of
a logic that, even under favouring conditions, is almost too coarse a
vehicle for the subtlety of the argument.

No more was said on the subject till the end of dinner. Hi