Before I could ask him what he meant, he looked up suddenly at me, with deep sadness on his usually nonchalant face.
“Well, my dear fellow, I suppose I must tell you all, as I have told you so much without your shaking the dust off your feet against me, and consulting Bradshaw for the earliest train to Shrewsbury. You knew my dear mother?”
“I did. The best of women.”
“The best of women, and the best of mothers. But, if you recollect, she was a great Low-Church saint.”
“Why ‘but’? How does that derogate in any wise from her excellence?”
“Not from her excellence; God forbid! or from the excellence of the people of her own party, whom she used to have round her, and who were, some of them, I do believe, as really earnest, and pious, and charitable, and all that, as human beings could be. But it did take away very much indeed from her influence on me.”
“Surely she did not neglect to teach you.”
“It is a strange thing to say, but she rather taught me too much. I don’t deny that it may have been my own fault. I don’t blame her, or any one. But you know what I was at college—no worse than other men, I dare say; but no better. I had no reason for being better.”
“No reason? Surely she gave you reasons.”
“There—you have touched the ailing nerve now. The reasons were what you would call paralogisms. They had no more to do with me than with those trout.”