You already have some idea of my other nephew, if you have noticed that
none of us, not even that habitual disrespecter of dignities, Billy,
ever called him Dan. It would have seemed as incongruous as to call
Billy William. He was one of those youths who never gave their parents a
moment's uneasiness; who never had to have their wills broken, and never
forget to put on their rubbers or take an umbrella. In boyhood he was
intended for a missionary. Had it been possible for him to go to
Greenland's icy mountains without catching cold, or India's coral
strand, without getting bilious, his parents would have carried out
their pleasing dream of contributing him to the world's evangelization.
Lu and Mr. Lovegrove had no doubt that he would have been greatly
blessed if he could have stood it....
Both she and his father always encouraged old manners in him. I think
they took such pride in raising a peculiarly pale boy as a gardener
does in getting a nice blanch on his celery, and so long as he was not
absolutely sick, the graver he was the better. He was a sensitive plant,
a violet by a mossy stone, and all that sort of thing....
At the time I introduce Billy, both Lu and her husband were much
changed. They had gained a great deal in width of view and liberality of
judgment. They read Dickens, and Thackeray with avidity; went now and
then to the opera; proposed to let Billy take a quarter at Dodworth's;
had statues in their parlor without any thought of shame at their lack
of petticoats, and did multitudes of things which, in their early
married life, they would have considered shocking.... They would greatly
have liked to see Daniel shine in society. Of his erudition they were
proud even to worship. The young man never had any business, and his
father never seemed to think of giving him any, knowing, as Billy would
say, that he had stamps enough to "see him through." If Daniel liked,
his father would have endowed a professorship in some college and given
him the chair; but that would have taken him away from his own room and
the family physician.
Daniel knew how much his parents wished him to make a figure in the
world, and only blamed himself for his failure, magnanimously forgetting
that they had crushed out the faculties which enable a man to mint the
small change of every-day society, in the exclusive cultivation of such
as fit him for smelting its ponderous ingots. With that merciful
blindness which alone prevents all our lives from becoming a horror of
nerveless self-reproach, his parents were equally unaware of their share
in the harm done him, when they ascribed to a delicate organization the
fact that, at an age when love runs riot in all healthy blood, he could
not see a Balmoral without his cheeks rivalling the most vivid stripe in
it. They flattered themselves that he would outgrow his bashfulness; but
Daniel had no such hope, and frequently confided in me that he thought
he should never marry at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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