"My dear Mrs. Wornock, I am deeply touched that you should offer to be my friend. Be assured I have no reserve, and am willing--possibly too willing--to talk of myself and my own people. I have no dark corners in my life. My history is all open country--an uninteresting landscape enough. But there is no difficult going--there are no bogs or risky bits over which the inquiring spirit need skim lightly. Your ear did not deceive you, just now. Fondly as I love my mother, I will freely confess that the bond that draws me to my father is the stronger bond. In the parrot jargon of the day, his is the more interesting 'personality.' He is a man of powerful intellect, whose mind has done nothing for the good of the world--who will die unhonoured and unremembered except by his familiar friends. There is one question I have asked myself about him ever since I was old enough to think--a question which I first asked myself when I began to read classics with him in my school vacations, and which I had not finished asking myself when his untiring help had enabled me to take a first-class in the Honour School. To me it has always been a mystery that a man of wide attainments and financial independence should have been utterly destitute of ambition. My father was a young man when he married; he is still in the prime of life; and for six and twenty years he has been content to vegetate in Suffolk, and has regarded his annual visit to London as more of an affliction than a relief. It is as if the hands of life's clock had stopped in the golden noon of youth. I have told myself again and again that my father's life must have been shadowed by some great sorrow before his marriage, young as he was when he married." Mrs. Wornock listened intently, her head slightly bent, her clasped hands resting on her knee, her sensitive lips slightly parted. "You say that your father married young," she said, after a brief silence, in which she seemed to be thinking over his words. "What do you call young in such a case?"