“It is shocking, dear, but accountable,” said her husband soothingly, “you are disturbed, and forget how widely modified heredity becomes by conditions. If I recollect aright Gwen mentioned one—Mag—h’m, Dow. Children are imitative creatures. And now, with regard to another matter. I think, dear love, it were wiser if you discontinued that proposed course of history. The imagination of our daughter Gwen must not be fostered until it has a sounder intellectual basis to work up from.”
“Very well, dear,” and Mrs. Waring sighed a sigh of relief. No one but herself knew the horrible embarrassment of having those two children sitting opposite to her and glaring all over her, while she discoursed to them on the customs of the early Britons, and it was only a consuming sense of duty that had seized on her, and forced her to the task.
CHAPTER II.
Not only the entire county of ——shire but even the whole University of Cambridge had been thrown into quite a whirl of emotion by the marriage of Henry Waring and Grace Selwyn, the most unexpected ever concocted in heaven or on earth.
A Senior Wrangler and a Fellow of his college, who at twenty-six, eats, drinks, and sleeps mathematics, besides being possessed of other devouring passions for certain of the minor sciences, does not seem a very fit subject for matrimony with its petty follies and cares.
If one is, besides, the son of a cynic and a bookworm, who loathed and eschewed the sex with bitter reason, and whose own practical knowledge had been gained chiefly through the classics and the bedmakers, the one of which appeals but little to one’s sense of propriety, the other still less to one’s fleshly sense, the prospect of a domestic and patriarchal career must seem as remote as it is undesirable.
And yet Henry Waring found himself, to his constant and increasing bewilderment, embarked on one almost before he altogether knew where he was.
The year previous to his marriage he had suffered a good deal from ennui. A favourite theory in geology over which he had peered himself half blind, was suddenly exploded without hope of reconstruction. He felt rather lost and distrait, and cast about for some tangible solid brainwork.
But to pass the time until the fresh inspiration came on, he took to propounding stray problems, and—through the press—launching them broadcast over the land. Strange to say, he got answers, and by the score. A good many more “mute inglorious Solons” infest our villages than we have any notion of.
Mr. Waring groaned in spirit and mourned over the depravity of the race as he read their epistles, and drew farther back than ever into his shell. If the average man and woman without the academical walls resembled these productions, the less one had to do with them the better, he very reasonably reflected.