eating in the kitchen when
alone, and to the son's taste that room, decorated with shining
utensils, with its door open to earth and sky, was infinitely more
picturesque and cheery; but the mother had a stronger will than her son,
and she had ordained that his rise in the world should be marked by his
eating in the dining-room, where meals were served whenever they had
company. Caius observed also, with a pain to which his heart was
sensitive, that at these meals she treated him to her company manners
also, asking him in a clear, firm voice if he "chose bread" or if he
would "choose a little meat," an expression common in the country as an
elegant manner of pressing food upon visitors. It was not that he felt
himself unworthy of this mark of esteem, but that the bad taste and the
bad English grated upon his nerves.

She was a strong, comely woman, this housemother, portly in person and
large of face, with plentiful gray hair brushed smooth; from the face
the colour had faded, but the look of health and strong purpose
remained. The father, on the other hand, tended to leanness; his large
frame was beginning to be obviously bowed by toil; his hair and beard
were somewhat long, and had a way of twisting themselves as though blown
by the wind. When the light of the summer morning shone through the
panes of clean glass upon this family at breakfast, it was obvious that
the son was physically somewhat degenerate. Athletics had not then come
into fashion; Caius was less in stature than might have been expected
from such parents; and now, after his years of town life, he had an
appearance of being limp in sinew, nor was there the same strong will
and alert shrewdness written upon his features. He was a handsome
fellow, clear-eyed and intelligent, finer far, in the estimation of his
parents, than themselves; but that which rounded out the lines of his
figure was rather a tendency to plumpness than the development of
muscle, and the intelligence of his face suggested rather the power to
think than the power to utilize his thought.

After the first glad days of the home-coming, the lack of education and
taste, and the habits that this lack engendered, jarred more and more
upon Caius. He loved his parents too well to betray his just distress at
the narrow round of thought and feeling in which their minds
revolved--the dogmatism of ignorance on all points, whether of social
custom or of the sublime reaches of theology; but this dis