His views on matters of the day varied, of course, with the views of those he talked to, since it was his privilege always to see either the other side or something so much more subtle on the same side as made that side the other. But all topical thought and emotion was beside the point for one who lived in his work; who lived to receive impressions and render them again so faithfully that you could not tell he had ever received them. His was--as he sometimes felt--a rare and precious personality. VII.--THE HOUSEWIFE Though frugal by temperament, and instinctively aware that her sterling nature was the bank in which the national wealth was surely deposited, she was of benevolent disposition; and when, as occasionally happened, a man in the street sold her one of those jumping toys for her children, she would look at him and say: “How much? You don’t look well!” and he would answer: “Tuppence, lidy. Truth is, lidy, I’ve gone ’ungry this lawst week.” Searching his face shrewdly, she would reply: “That’s bad--a sin against the body. Here’s threepence. Give me a ha’penny. You don’t look well.” And, taking the ha’penny, she would leave the man inarticulate. Food appealed to her, not only in relation to herself, but to others. Often to some friend she would speak a little bitterly, a little mournfully, about her husband. “Yes, I quite like my ‘hubby’ to go out sometimes where he can talk about art, and war, and things that women can’t. He takes no interest in his food.” And she would add, brooding: “What he’d do if I didn’t study him, I really don’t know.” She often felt with pain that he was very thin. She studied him incessantly--that is, in due proportion to their children, their position in society, their Christianity, and herself. If he was her “hubby,” she was his “hub”--the housewife, that central pivot of society, that national pivot, which never could or would be out of gear. Devoid of conceit, it seldom occurred to her to examine her own supremacy, quietly content to be “integer vitæ, scelerisque pura”--just the one person against whom nobody could say anything. Subconsciously, no doubt, she _must_ have valued her worth and reputation, or she would never have felt such salutary gusts of irritation and contempt toward persons who had none. Like cows when a dog comes into a field, she would herd together whenever she saw a woman with what she suspected was a past, then advance upon her, horns down. If the offending creature did not speedily vacate the field, she would, if possible, trample her to death. When, by any chance, the female dog proved too swift and lively, she would remain sullenly turning and turning her horns in the direction of its vagaries. Well she knew that, if she once raised those horns and let the beast pass, her whole herd would suffer. There was something almost magnificent about her virtue, based, as it was, entirely on self-preservation, and her remarkable