'Victor,' she makes William Crimsworth say, 'is as little of a pretty child as I am of a handsome man ... he is pale and spare, with large eyes.... His shape is symmetrical enough, but slight.... I never saw a child smile less than he does, nor one who knits such a formidable brow when sitting over a book that interests him, or while listening to tales of adventure, peril, or wonder.... But, though still, he is not unhappy--though serious, not morose; he has a susceptibility to pleasurable sensations almost too keen, for it amounts to enthusiasm.... When he could read, he became a glutton of books, and is so still. His toys have been few, and he has never wanted more. For those he possesses he seems to have contracted a partiality amounting to affection; this feeling, directed towards one or two living animals of the house, strengthens almost to a passion.... I saw in the soil of his heart healthy and swelling germs of compassion, affection, fidelity. I discovered in the garden of his intellect a rich growth of wholesome principles--reason, justice, moral courage, promised, if not blighted, a fertile bearing.... She (his mother) sees, as I also see, a something in Victor's temper--a kind of electrical ardour and power--which emits, now and then, ominous sparks; Hunsden calls it his spirit, and says it should not be curbed. I call it the leaven of the offending Adam, and consider that it should be, if not _whipped_ out of him, at least soundly disciplined; and that he will be cheap of any amount of either bodily or mental suffering which will ground him radically in the art of self-control. Frances (his mother) gives this _something_ in her son's marked character no name; but when it appears in the grinding of his teeth, in the glittering of his eye, in the fierce revolt of feeling against disappointment, mischance, sudden sorrow, or supposed injustice, she folds him to her breast, or takes him to walk with her alone in the wood; then she reasons with him like any philosopher, and to reason Victor is ever accessible; then she looks at him with eyes of love, and by love Victor can be infallibly subjugated. But will reason or love be the weapons with which in future the world will meet his violence? Oh, no! for that flash in his black eye--for that cloud on his bony brow--for that compression of his statuesque lips, the lad will some day get blows instead of blandishments, kicks instead of kisses; then for the fit of mute fury which will sicken the body and madden his soul; then for the ordeal of merited and salutary suffering out of which he will come (I trust) a wiser and a better man.'