“What business have they with children, those two?” cried Mrs. Fellowes with a little spasm of pain twisting about her mouth. “I don’t believe those children ever got properly hugged in all their lives by that inhuman little mother of theirs. And oh, Gwen’s dress! That is awful!”
“Ah, yes, that makes the whole affair very much sadder! Don’t you think dinner is ready? Yes, those children have a great deal to fight against, it isn’t their ancestors alone that will handicap them, poor little beggars.”
“Cartloads of saints for ancestors wouldn’t be worth a rap to them with an eerie little creature like that for a mother,” said Mrs. Fellowes hotly, in the pretty lazy drawl into which her touch of twang had developed itself. “I pity that wretched coming tutor.”
She let her skirts drop and gave them a dexterous kick as she went out, to give them the correct “hang”.
CHAPTER VI.
There was no time lost in setting the experiment going, and it was soon in full swing. Its birth pangs were awful, and embraced in their throes a great number of persons. The parents’ sufferings were so complex and so quite peculiar to themselves that it is impossible to expound them to an unsympathizing public.
The tortures that couple endured during the first few months after the initial stage of intellectual development had been instituted and was being dealt with, were severe, but they were in no wise connected with their children’s anguish at the sudden and unexpected onslaught on their higher parts.
Their misery arose chiefly from the jarring and inconveniently close contact with tutors, whom, in their unconscious Christian way, they found it their duty to admit for some part of every day into the edge of their lives. This was a terrible discipline, more especially as during these times the unhappy instructors also thought it their duty to ease off their slough of learning and to expand their social parts, and thus the manufacture of small talk became a daily necessity in the lives of the distracted pair.
They had both taken infinite pains to provide silent entertainment for their guests—or rather succession of guests—in the tutoring line. The standard scientists were first tried, and these seeming to have but little effect, a whole cartload of mixed literature, including all the rag-tag and bobtail of fiction the bookseller wanted to get off his hands, was imported and spread about enticingly; theology and ethics were also given a show, till at last all the tables at one side of the room were spotted with slate, yellow, and dull blues and browns, and every form of journal from the Times to the Police News was scattered broadcast over the place, all with a view to lay hold on the tutorial mind and keep it independent of its entertainers.
Directly the tutor for the time being, entered at his appointed hour, they rose simultaneously from their work, as if the same spring moved them, hurried towards him with outstretched hands, sat down side by side facing him, and broke into conversation, which if gaspy, and at times inconsequent, from the sudden upheaval of waves of thought in one or other of them, was kept up with gallant relentlessness till the period of detention was at an end.