It was his nature to
be easy-going as a husband; indulgent as a father; careful and
straightforward as a politician; and as a man, addicted to pleasure, to
work, and to fresh air. He admired, and was fond of his wife, and had
never regretted his marriage. He had never perhaps regretted anything,
unless it were that he had not yet won the Derby, or quite succeeded in
getting his special strain of blue-ticked pointers to breed absolutely
true to type. His mother-in-law he respected, as one might respect a
principle.
There was indeed in the personality of that little old lady the
tremendous force of accumulated decision--the inherited assurance of one
whose prestige had never been questioned; who, from long immunity, and a
certain clear-cut matter-of-factness, bred by the habit of command,
had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could
be questioned. Her knowledge of her own mind was no ordinary piece of
learning, had not, in fact, been learned at all, but sprang full-fledged
from an active dominating temperament. Fortified by the necessity,
common to her class, of knowing thoroughly the more patent side of
public affairs; armoured by the tradition of a culture demanded by
leadership; inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas; owning no
master, but in servitude to her own custom of leading, she had a
mind, formidable as the two-edged swords wielded by her ancestors
the Fitz-Harolds, at Agincourt or Poitiers--a mind which had ever
instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the
selves of others; produced by those foolish practices of introspection,
contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority.
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