under all the
overlaid cultivation and restraint.

Without bothering itself about the recondite problems of heredity or the
influence of environment, the world wisely makes great account of
"stock." The peasant nature, which may be a very different thing from
the peasant condition, persists, and shows itself in business affairs, in
literature, even in the artist. No marriage is wisely contracted without
consideration of "stock." The admirable qualities which make a union one
of mutual respect and enduring affection--the generosities, the
magnanimities, the courage of soul, the crystalline truthfulness, the
endurance of ill fortune and of prosperity--are commonly the persistence
of the character of the stock.

We can get on with surface weaknesses and eccentricities, and even
disagreeable peculiarities, if the substratum of character is sound.
There is no woman or man so difficult--to get on with, whatever his or
her graces or accomplishments, as the one "you don't know where to find,"
as the phrase is. Indeed, it has come to pass that the highest and final
eulogy ever given to a man, either in public or private life, is that he
is one "you can tie to." And when you find a woman of that sort you do
not need to explain to the cynical the wisdom of the Creator in making
the most attractive and fascinating sex.

The traits, good and bad, persist; they may be veneered or restrained,
they are seldom eradicated. All the traits that made the great Napoleon
worshiped, hated, and feared existed in the little Bonaparte, as
perfectly as the pea-pod in the flower. The whole of the First Empire
was smirched with Corsican vulgarity. The world always reckons with
these radical influences that go to make up a family. One of the first
questions asked by an old politician, who knew his world thoroughly,
about any man becoming prominent, when there was a discussion of his
probable action, was, "Whom did he marry?"

There are exceptions to this general rule, and they are always noticeable
when they occur--this deviation from the traits of the earliest years
--and offer material fox some of the subtlest and most interesting studies
of the novelist.

It was impossible for those who met Philip Burnett after he had left
college, and taken his degree in the law-school, and spent a year, more
or less studiously, in Europe, to really know him if they had not known
the dreaming boy in his early home, with all the limitations as well as
the v