ER VI.

TOM HELMER.

When Tom Helmer's father died, his mother, who had never been able to
manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence
till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until
again he went. Never thereafter did those two, mother and son, meet,
whether from a separation of months or of hours, without at once
tumbling into an obstinate difference. When the youth was at home,
their sparring, to call it by a mild name, went on from morning to
night, and sometimes almost from night to morning. Primarily, of
course, the fault lay with the mother; and things would have gone far
worse, had not the youth, along with the self-will of his mother,
inherited his father's good nature. At school he was a great favorite,
and mostly had his own way, both with boys and masters, for, although a
fool, he was a pleasant fool, clever, fond of popularity, and
complaisant with everybody--except always his mother, the merest word
from whom would at once rouse all the rebel in his blood. In person he
was tall and loosely knit, with large joints and extremities. His face
was handsome and vivacious, expressing far more than was in him to
express, and giving ground for expectation such as he had never met. He
was by no means an ill-intentioned fellow, preferred doing well and
acting fairly, and neither at school nor at college had got into any
serious scrape. But he had never found it imperative to reach out after
his own ideal of duty. He had never been worthy the name of student, or
cared much for anything beyond the amusements the universities provide
so liberally, except dabbling in literature. Perhaps his only vice was
self-satisfaction--which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance
never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself
only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that
these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even
struck him that they ought to correspond. In his own eyes he did well
enough, and a good deal better. Gifted not only with fluency of speech,
that crowning glory and ruin of a fool, but with plausibility of tone
and demeanor, a confidence that imposed both on himself and on others,
and a certain dropsical impressionableness of surface which made him
seem and believe himself sympathetic, nobody could well help liking
him, and it took some time to make one accept the disappointment he
caused.

He was