Towards all women he had a sort of pitying, tender chivalry. That his mother had done to him. He did not over-rate female intellect or character (like the uncle, whom he resembled so much, intellect in womenkind did not attract him, and he prized them most when their virtues were passive and not too diverse), but he bore them one and all good-will, and the constant small attentions he paid Mrs. Leavitt, and even the maid-servants, were almost as much a native tenderness as a calculated diplomacy. Mrs. Leavitt and the maids were not ungrateful. Women of all sorts and of all conditions are easiest purchased, and held, with small coins. A husband may break all the commandments, and break them over his wife’s very back roughly, and be more probably forgiven than for failing to raise his hat when he meets her on the street. Stephen was very careful about his hat, indoors and out. He had seen his father wear his in his mother’s sitting-room, and by her very bedside. The lesson had sunk, and it stuck.

But his love of his mother, and its jealous observance of her, had trained him to feel for women rather than to respect them. He had seen her sicken and shiver under the storm, and bow down and endure it patiently, when he would have had her breast and quell it. He had not heard Life’s emphatic telling—he was too young to catch it—that strength is strongest when it seems weak and meek, that great loyalty is the strongest of all strength as well as the highest of all virtues, and that often Loyalty for ermine must wear a yoke,—and always must it bear uncomplainingly a “friend’s infirmities.”

The boy was a unique, and a blend of his father and his “Uncle Dick.” He was wonderfully like each. From his mother he had inherited nothing but a possibility, an aptitude, a predisposition even, towards great loyalty, which in her had crystallized and perfected into everlasting and invincible self-sacrifice. In her son it was young yet, plastic and undeveloped. In maturity it might match, or even exceed, her own; or, on the other hand, experiences sufficiently rasping and deforming might wrench and transmute it, under the black alchemy of sufficient tragedy, even into treachery itself.

If few boys of fourteen are tormented by ambition, very many such youngsters suffer from genuine heart-hunger. We never see or suspect or care. They scarcely suspect themselves, and never understand. But the canker is there, terribly often, and it eats and eats. The heart-ache of a little child is a hideous tragedy, and when it is untold and unsoothed it twists and poisons all after life and character. Angels may rise above such spiritual 

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