ive earth, with all its poor roots hanging bare, as
though groping for the earth to cling to. She knew now that she had
lived too long in the soil that she had hated; and was too old to be
transplanted. The custom of the country--that weighty, wingless creature
born of time and of the earth--had its limbs fast twined around her. It
had made of her its mistress, and was not going to let her go.

CHAPTER II

THE SON AND THE MOTHER

Harder than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle is it for
a man to become a member of the Stoics' Club, except by virtue of the
hereditary principle; for unless he be nourished he cannot be elected,
and since by the club's first rule he may have no occupation whatsoever,
he must be nourished by the efforts of those who have gone before. And
the longer they have gone before the more likely he is to receive no
blackballs.

Yet without entering into the Stoics' Club it is difficult for a man to
attain that supreme outward control which is necessary to conceal his
lack of control within; and, indeed, the club is an admirable instance
of how Nature places the remedy to hand for the disease. For, perceiving
how George Pendyce and hundreds of other young men "to the manner
born" had lived from their birth up in no connection whatever with the
struggles and sufferings of life, and fearing lest, when Life in her
careless and ironical fashion brought them into abrupt contact with
ill-bred events they should make themselves a nuisance by their cries
of dismay and wonder, Nature had devised a mask and shaped it to its
highest form within the portals of the Stoics' Club. With this mask she
clothed the faces of these young men whose souls she doubted, and called
them--gentlemen. And when she, and she alone, heard their poor squeaks
behind that mask, as Life placed clumsy feet on them, she pitied them,
knowing that it was not they who were in fault, but the unpruned system
which had made them what they were. And in her pity she endowed many
of them with thick skins, steady feet, and complacent souls, so that,
treading in well-worn paths their lives long, they might slumber to
their deaths in those halls where their fathers had slumbered to their
deaths before them. But sometimes Nature (who was not yet a Socialist)
rustled her wings and heaved a sigh, lest the excesses and excrescences
of their system should bring about excesses and excrescences of the
opposite sort. For extravagance of