Once her spirits became accustomed to the scenes around her, she would have felt dull missing her Inchbrae occupations, had it not been for Lady Lyons. Lady Lyons had seen a great deal more of the world than Mrs. Dorriman; but seeing the world does not always imply fuller understanding. It is quite possible to see a great deal and take in nothing. Lady Lyons was a woman who had arranged her ideas before she left the paternal nest, and, partly from ill-health, partly from a limited understanding, she was narrow-minded and prejudiced, and everything was measured by her own standard, and that was as small as it could be.
Her character acted fatally upon her son. She had been left a widow young (with a moderate fortune and this only son). People went into ecstacies over the way in which she gave up her life to her son, which meant that he never went to school. He was educated upon her lines—under her own eye. She was desperately afraid of the wickedness of the world, schools were full of iniquity, therefore he never went to school. Companions he had none. She was afraid of his knowing boys with school experiences. Paul Lyons was content, knowing nothing better. He grew up narrow, selfish, and consequential, his world bounded by his mother and himself, with no developed intelligence, no nobility of thought, no aims, no aspirations, thinking himself in all ways superior to other men, and interested in nothing outside his little molehill.
Then came one brief terrible experience.
Lady Lyons, worse than usual in health, was ordered to a watering-place in the South of France, and to winter in Nice.
She knew nothing of the world; and of course Paul, who had never stood upon his own feet anywhere, was equally ignorant. Before he had been many days in the little place he had been taken in hand by the worst possible class of men; and at Nice he got into every conceivable scrape, lost money all round at Monaco, was fleeced and put into all sorts of disgraceful positions by those who told him they would make a man of him; and found himself terribly in debt, ill, and threatened with all sorts of penalties before he had been six weeks in the place.
Lady Lyons, gently obtaining the air in a Bath-chair, which, with a strong misgiving about the means of locomotion, she encumbered herself with, dreamed on in blissful ignorance.
She had given her son "principles," she thought, and she imagined that to be enough.
Paul was forced to get money from her, but he told her very little; indeed, the poor lady always talked of Paul as having been robbed, and in talking of his adventures spoke as though he had been an unblemished knight who had been robbed because his principles were too good to allow him to win, and on these occasions, though the young man would colour, so much grace was left in him, he would make a grimace when she was not looking, expressive of her foolish innocence and belief in him.
This beginning once made, he went down-hill rapidly. Once a young man reared in ignorance of the world conceives sin to be a sign of manliness, his fate is sealed.
Before he was utterly ruined, however, he was pulled up short by a long and terrible fever he was very long of recovering from. Lady Lyons, who, though a feeble, narrow-minded mother, was an affectionate one—the strain of anxiety was too much for her, and his recovery was followed by her having a paralytic stroke.