“Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t say such a dreadful thing. What should I do if he did not live to be a man? I think I should kill myself! We his next heirs, and acting as father and mother to him--Oh, no, no. If I did not believe that under all his delicacy he had a tough wiry constitution, I should never have consented to take such a charge.” But notwithstanding the tough, wiry constitution in which she believed, Mrs. Parke was too anxious about her nephew to allow him to go to school. It was too exciting for him, it was too exhausting for him. With the germs, perhaps, who could tell, of madness in him, it was altogether too dangerous. And Mar accordingly grew up at home under the charge of successive tutors who rarely managed to please Mrs. Parke, or to please themselves under her roof, for long together. Either they had theories as to what was good for their pupil which did not agree with hers, or they found the life so deadly dull which they were expected to spend with Mar in seclusion, shut out from everything that might be going on, that it soon became insufferable to them. They formed quite a procession coming and going, one following the other, and as each man had, more or less, a different system, it may be supposed that poor little Mar’s education did not advance in any remarkable way. What they all agreed in was a desire to get the boy into the open air, to give him the advantage of a country life, to make him hardy and active. But to this Mrs. Parke maintained a constant opposition. He was not strong enough, she said; his lungs were delicate; he would not bear the exposure and exercise which were good for the others. In summer she was obliged to relax her rules, but in winter she was obdurate, with the natural consequence that Mar caught cold more readily than anyone else in the house.