speak to her sometimes for a whole
morning, the brute."

"But is he not fond of his children?"

"Fond? Yes, his way, and small thanks to him, the little angels! To
play with 'em when they're good, and tell them cock-and-a-bull fairy
tales--wonder why he likes to put such stuff into their heads--and
then send 'em out of the room if they make a noise, because it splits
his poor head, and his nerves are so delicate. Wish he had hers, or
mine either, Doctor Thurnall; then he'd know what nerves was, in a
frail woman, which he uses us both as his negro slaves, or would if I
didn't stand up to him pretty sharp now and then, and give him a piece
of my mind, which I will do, like the faithful servant in the parable,
if he kills me for it, Doctor Thurnall!"

"Does he drink?" asked Tom, bluntly.

"He!" she answered, in a tone which seemed to imply that even one
masculine vice would have raised him in her eyes. "He's not man
enough, I think; and lives on his slops, and his coffee, and his
tapioca; and how's he ever to have any appetite, always a sitting
about, heaped up together over his books, with his ribs growing into
his backbone?--If he'd only go and take his walk, or get a spade and
dig in the garden, or anything but them everlasting papers, which I
hates the sight of;" and so forth.

From all which Tom gathered a tolerably clear notion of the poor
poet's state of body and mind; as a self-indulgent, unmethodical
person, whose ill-temper was owing partly to perpetual brooding over
his own thoughts, and partly to dyspepsia, brought on by his own
effeminacy--in both cases, not a thing to be pitied or excused by the
hearty and valiant Doctor. And Tom's original contempt for Vavasour
took a darker form, perhaps one too dark to be altogether just.

"I'll tackle him, Miss Clara."

"I wish you would: I'm sure he wants some one to look after him just
now. He's half wild about some review that somebody's been and done of
him in The Times, and has been flinging the paper about the room, and
calling all mankind vipers and adders, and hooting herds--it's as bad
as swearing, I say--and running to my mistress, to make her read it,
and see how the whole world's against him, and then forbidding her to
defile her eyes with a word of it; and so on, till she's been crying
all the morning, poor dear!"

"Why not laughing at him?"

"Poor thing; that's where it all is: she's just as anxious about his
poetry as he is, and would write it