you are not angry, Mother?"

"I can hardly say that I am not. Angry? No. But when I consider the
usual nature of the drag which causes men of promise to disappoint the
world I feel uneasy."

"You deserve credit for the feeling, Mother. But I can assure you that
you need not be disturbed by it on my account."

"When I think of you and your new crotchets," said Mrs. Yeobright,
with some emphasis, "I naturally don't feel so comfortable as I did a
twelvemonth ago. It is incredible to me that a man accustomed to the
attractive women of Paris and elsewhere should be so easily worked upon
by a girl in a heath. You could just as well have walked another way."

"I had been studying all day."

"Well, yes," she added more hopefully, "I have been thinking that you
might get on as a schoolmaster, and rise that way, since you really are
determined to hate the course you were pursuing."

Yeobright was unwilling to disturb this idea, though his scheme was far
enough removed from one wherein the education of youth should be made
a mere channel of social ascent. He had no desires of that sort. He had
reached the stage in a young man's life when the grimness of the general
human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes
ambition to halt awhile. In France it is not uncustomary to commit
suicide at this stage; in England we do much better, or much worse, as
the case may be.

The love between the young man and his mother was strangely invisible
now. Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In
its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all
exhibition of itself is painful. It was so with these. Had conversations
between them been overheard, people would have said, "How cold they are
to each other!"

His theory and his wishes about devoting his future to teaching had made
an impression on Mrs. Yeobright. Indeed, how could it be otherwise
when he was a part of her--when their discourses were as if carried on
between the right and the left hands of the same body? He had despaired
of reaching her by argument; and it was almost as a discovery to him
that he could reach her by a magnetism which was as superior to words as
words are to yells.

Strangely enough he began to feel now that it would not be so hard
to persuade her who was his best friend that comparative poverty was
essentially the higher course for him, as to reconcile to his feelings
the act of persuading