The father met it with tolerably good humour, but he was busy writing a paper for one of the monthly reviews and would have stayed inside no matter how fine a day it was. Therefore, he could take no credit for his genial mood, and his disposition must for the moment pass as unproven. But, if you had taken from the mother her piece of work—she was busy embroidering a lady’s pinafore in the colours of a peacock’s feather—and given her nothing to do, she would yet have been as peaceful as she now looked, for she knew who made her.

A tall lad stood at one of the windows in a mood of smouldering rebellion against the order of things. He was such a creature of moods that individual judgments of his character might well have proved irreconcilable. He had not yet begun to use his will—for he constantly mistook impulse for will—to blend the conflicting elements of his nature into one. As a man he was, therefore, much like the mass of flour and raisins, etc., before it becomes a plum pudding. He would have to pass through something analogous to boiling before he would become worthy of the name man. In his own estimate of himself, he claimed the virtues he was conscious of in his good moods, and let the bad ones slide without looking too closely into them. He substituted forgetfulness for repudiation, a return of good humour for repentance, and at best a joke for apology.

Mark, a pale, handsome boy of ten, and Josephine, a rosy girl of seven, sat on the opposite side of the fire amusing themselves with a puzzle. The gusts of wind and the great splashes of rain on the glass only made them feel cosier and more satisfied.

“Beastly weather!” said Cornelius as he turned toward the room rather than the persons in it.

“I’m sorry you don’t like it, Corney,” said his elder sister where she sat beside her mother trimming what promised to be a pretty bonnet. A concentrated effort to draw her needle through an accumulation of silken folds seemed to take something off the bloom of the smile with which she spoke.

“Oh, it’s all very well for girls!” returned Cornelius. “You don’t do anything worthwhile. And besides, you’ve got so many things you like to do, and so much time to do them in, that it’s all the same to you whether you go out or stay home. But when a fellow has but a miserable three weeks and then it’s back to a job he hates, it is rather hard to have it turn out like this. Day after day, as sure as the sun rises—if it does rise—the weather is as abominable as rain and wind can make it!”

“My dear boy!” said his mother without looking up.

“Oh yes, mother! I know! You’re so good you would have had Job himself take it coolly. But I’m not like you. Only you needn’t think me so very—what do you call it? It’s only a breach in the laws of nature I’m grumbling at. I don’t mean anything to offend you.”