From Lady Geraldine the boy had received no bent towards high thoughts or a noble ambition. She loved him passionately, but with a love that was both weak and selfish. She would have had him educated at home, a boudoir sybarite, to lie on the Persian rug at her feet and read frivolous books in fine bindings; to sit by her side when she drove; to be pampered and idolised and ruined in body and soul. The father’s strong sense interfered to prevent this. Mr. Giles-Goring was no classic, and he was a self-taught mathematician, while the boy’s tutor had taken honours in both branches of learning; but he was clever enough to see that this luxurious home-education was a mockery, that the lad was being flattered by an obsequious tutor, and spoiled by a foolish mother. He sent the Oxonian about his business, and took the boy to Eton, not before Lady Geraldine had done him as much harm as a doting mother can do to a beloved son. She had taught him, unintentionally and unconsciously, perhaps, to despise his father. She had taught him to consider himself, by right of his likeness to her and his keen sympathy with all her thoughts and fancies and prejudices—a sympathy to which she had, as unconsciously, trained and schooled him—belonging to her class and not to his father’s. The low-born father was an accident in his life—a good endurable man, and to be respected (after a fashion) for his lowly worth, but spiritually, eclectically, æsthetically, of no kin with the son who bore his name, and who was to inherit, and perhaps waste, his hard-won wealth. The mother and son had a code of signals, little looks and subtle smiles, with which they communicated their ideas before the blunt plain-spoken father. Lady Geraldine never spoke against her husband: nor did she descend even in moments of confidence to vulgar ridicule. ‘So like your father,’ she would say, with her languid smile, of any honest unconventional act or speech of Mr. Giles-Goring’s; and it must be confessed that Mr. Giles-Goring was one of those impulsive outspoken men who do somewhat exercise a wife’s patience. Lady Geraldine never lost her temper with him; she was never rude; she never overtly thwarted his wishes, or opposed his plans; but she shrugged her graceful shoulders, and lifted her delicately-pencilled eyebrows, and allowed her son to understand what an impassable gulf yawned between her, the daughter of a hundred earls—or at least half-a-dozen—and the self-made millionaire.