Whether in his own youth he would have done better in a position like his son’s, as his worshipping wife believed, may be doubtful.

—Two —

An Eventful Walk

Gerald Raymount was a man of an unusual combination of qualities. His character contained such contradictions as to make one think there was almost a savage strain in him. On the other hand, he possessed a sharp mind, which seemed to indicate a heritage of culture. At the university he had read widely outside his specific requirements and thus had developed a broad faculty in literature.

From a long line of ancestors, he had inherited a few thousand pounds from his father, a country attorney. However, he had found that as his family had increased, his income was not sufficient for their accustomed style of living. There were no extravagant tastes among them, but neither did they possess the faculty for saving money and were rather too free with it in small things. The result was that Mr. Raymount was compelled to rouse himself out of his self-indulgence, and as the reader of many books now take himself to his study table, and try to discover whether he might be capable of writing articles that could add to his shrinking income.

Though Mr. Raymount was driven to this extreme by necessity, it did serve to some extent to make a man of him. The question is not whether a man works because he has to, but whether the work he does is good, honest work for which the world is better off. In this matter there are many first that shall be last. The work of a baker for instance, must stand higher in the judgment of the universe than that of a brewer, no matter how good his ale might be. Because the one trade brings in more money than the other, many in the world count it more honourable. But there is another judgment at hand.

In the exercise of his calling, Mr. Raymount was compelled to think more carefully than before, and so not only his mind but his moral and spiritual nature took a fresh start. More and more he wrote of the feelings and experiences of his own heart and history, and so, by degrees, gained power to rouse the will, not merely the emotions, or even the aspirations of men—the only true kind of power. The poetry of his college days now came to the service of his prose, and the deeper poetic nature, which is the prophetic in every man, awoke in him. His wife grew proud of him and of his work. Even though she looked upon her husband as a great man, she was still the practical wisdom of the house. He was not a great man—only a growing man. Yet she was nothing the worse for thinking so highly of him, because he was a growing man.

The daughter of a London barrister, of what is called a good family, she had known something of life before she married. From mere dissatisfaction she had early begun to withdraw from the show and self-assertion of social life, and sought within herself the door of that quiet chamber whose existence is unknown to most. For a time she had not heeded a certain soft knocking of one who would enter and share it with her. But now for a long time he who knocked had been her companion in the chamber whose walls are infinite. Why is it that men and women will welcome any romance or tale of love, devotion, and sacrifice from one to another of themselves, but turn from the least hint at the existence of a perfect love at the root of it all? Is it not because their natures are yet so far from the ideal, the natural, the true, that the words of the prophet rouse in them no vision, no poorest perception of spiritual fact?