Fan was chronically distressed by this flaw of negligence in Oliver’s idiosyncrasy. She had made a searching analysis to discover its origin, in the course of vigorous attempts to overcome the weakness, but she had been no more able to reach its root than she had succeeded in shaking its influence for a day. It was not that Oliver was so ill-made that his coats and trousers would not sit properly on his figure, for he was really a handsome man if he could have done himself justice. It was not that the habits of a gentleman did not come naturally to him, and had not been long practised by him. For that matter their father, who had never aspired to be more than his father had been before him, had shown himself a tidy old martinet in his ways—just as she, Fan, could not bear a pin out of its place, long before she was subjected to school training. Yet here was Oliver, who had enjoyed every advantage since he was a mere lad, who was, as Fan owned willingly, more fastidious than herself in all essentials of manly and womanly good breeding, in non-essentials a picture of helpless, hopeless disorder from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; with the shifting hat or cap on the drifting clouds of brown hair which no close clipping of barber could keep a week in its place; with his crumpled collar, his loosened, twisted necktie, his eccentric cuffs—one of which would disappear up his coat-sleeve, while the other would out-herod fashion by hanging not merely over his knuckles, but nearly to the tips of his fingers. The last offence was in his boots, which, let Oliver buy them from the prince of honest and accomplished boot-makers, in the course of a week or two, took to disreputable curling up at the toes and going down at the heels, with an air of being hard upon the parting of upper leather and sole, and of affording an irresistible attraction to mud and dust, like the sorriest hob-nailed shoes of any day labourer. All this in a young, handsome, college-bred man would have been unpardonable if there had been any cure for it; but Fan in her despair was profoundly conscious there was none. She might call Oliver to account every hour of the day, as a mother who is a disciplinarian may lecture a careless hoyden among her daughters. Oliver would take her remonstrance in perfect good humour, but he would not be a bit the better for it. She might quote for his benefit with cutting sarcasm the old tripping compliment to the very wildness of _abandon_ in woman’s dress—— ‘Hair loosely flowing, dress as free; Simplicity more taketh me,—’ and ask him if he thought that applied as well to a man’s toilet?