which he had never lost hold, to be a
thorough Englishman again some day, had kept up the habit of considering all his
conclusions with reference to English politics and English social conditions. He
meant to stand up for every change that the economical condition of the country
required, and he had an angry contempt for men with coronets on their coaches,
but too small a share of brains to see when they had better make a virtue of
necessity. His respect was rather for men who had no coronets, but who achieved
a just influence by furthering all measures which the common sense of the
country, and the increasing self-assertion of the majority, peremptorily
demanded. He could be such a man himself.
    In fact Harold Transome was a clever, frank, good-natured egoist; not
stringently consistent, but without any disposition to falsity; proud, but with
a pride that was moulded in an individual rather than an hereditary form;
unspeculative, unsentimental, unsympathetic; fond of sensual pleasures, but
disinclined to all vice, and attached as a healthy, clear-sighted person, to all
conventional morality, construed with a certain freedom, like doctrinal articles
to which the public order may require subscription. A character is apt to look
but indifferently, written out in this way. Reduced to a map, our premises seem
insignificant, but they make, nevertheless, a very pretty freehold to live in
and walk over; and so, if Harold Transome had been among your acquaintances, and
you had observed his qualities through the medium of his agreeable person,
bright smile, and a certain easy charm which accompanies sensuousness when
unsullied by coarseness - through the medium also of the many opportunities in
which he would have made himself useful or pleasant to you - you would have
thought him a good fellow, highly acceptable as a guest, a colleague, or a
brother-in-law. Whether all mothers would have liked him as a son, is another
question.
    It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the background, that mothers
have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become
taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world,
there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their
boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to
their shirt-buttons. Mrs Transome was certainly not one of those bland, adoring,
and gently tearful women. After sharing the common dream that when a beautiful
man-child was born to her, her cup of happiness would be full