his brothers. He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his
legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his
eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The
manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner
of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had
lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the
contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and
swains.
After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,
well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest
fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by
the lathe of a systematic tuition. They were both somewhat
short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass
and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the
custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was
the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all
without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own
vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies;
and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on
their shelves. When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they
admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour
of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal
objection.
If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed
their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church;
Cuthbert all College. His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the
mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each
brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score
of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were
neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated
rather than reckoned with and respected.
They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their
visits to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more
recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less
self-sacrificing and disinterested. More tolerant than his father of
a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he
was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own
teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,
though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.
As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived
in him--that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself,
neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as
with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good
as their opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate
conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and
gentle current in which they and their associates floated. Neither
saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what
the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite
a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.
'I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,'
