I have been
horridly anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be
to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to
immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as
wise in that as in other things.
Quick and keen-edged as he was, I cannot recall his ever losing his
temper with any of us at home. Firm he was under his great tenderness
for children; those nearest him felt a certain awe before the
infallible force of his moral judgments; his arbitrament, though
rarely invoked, was instant and final. Going out into the world
afterwards, I think we did not fail to realize how different the
home atmosphere must be where self-control does not rule, and the
inevitable rubs of life find vent in irritable and ill-considered
words.
It was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence that for the
first fifteen or twenty years of his married life he had scarcely any
time to devote to his children. The "lodger," as he used to describe
himself, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes
spare half-an-hour just before or just after dinner to draw wonderful
pictures for the little ones, or on a Sunday he would now and then
walk with the elder ones to Hampstead Heath or to the Zoo, where, as
a constant visitant to the prosector's laboratory, he was a well-known
figure, and admitted by the keepers to their arcana.
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