“You see, when I married your mother,” he went on, “I was a rich man. She had everything she wanted.”
“But you will get it all back,” I cried.
“I try to think so,” he answered. “I do think so—generally speaking. But there are times—you would not understand—they come to you.”
“But she is happy,” I persisted; “we are all happy.”
He shook his head.
“I watch her,” he said. “Women suffer more than we do. They live more in the present. I see my hopes, but she—she sees only me, and I have always been a failure. She has lost faith in me.”
I could say nothing. I understood but dimly.
“That is why I want you to be an educated man, Paul,” he continued after a silence. “You can't think what a help education is to a man. I don't mean it helps you to get on in the world; I think for that it rather hampers you. But it helps you to bear adversity. To a man with a well-stored mind, life is interesting on a piece of bread and a cup of tea. I know. If it were not for you and your mother I should not trouble.”
And yet at that time our fortunes were at their brightest, so far as I remember them; and when they were dark again he was full of fresh hope, planning, scheming, dreaming again. It was never acting. A worse actor never trod this stage on which we fret. His occasional attempts at a cheerfulness he did not feel inevitably resulted in our all three crying in one another's arms. No; it was only when things were going well that experience came to his injury. Child of misfortune, he ever rose, Antaeus-like, renewed in strength from contact with his mother.
Nor must it be understood that his despondent moods, even in time of prosperity, were oft recurring. Generally speaking, as he himself said, he was full of confidence. Already had he fixed upon our new house in Guilford Street, then still a good residential quarter; while at the same time, as he would explain to my mother, sufficiently central for office purposes, close as it was to Lincoln and Grey's Inn and Bedford Row, pavements long worn with the weary footsteps of the Law's sad courtiers.