The Way of All Flesh
things up only to throw them down again. How can he find out his strength or weakness otherwise? A man's profession," she said, and here she gave one of her wicked little laughs, "is not like his wife, which he must take once for all, for better for worse, without proof beforehand. Let him go here and there, and learn his truest liking by finding out what, after all, he catches himself turning to most habitually—then let him stick to this; but I daresay Ernest will be forty or five and forty before he settles down. Then all his previous infidelities will work together to him for good if he is the boy I hope he is.
"Above all," she continued, "do not let him work up to his full strength, except once or twice in his lifetime; nothing is well done nor worth doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily. Theobald and Christina would give him a pinch of salt and tell him to put it on the tails of the seven deadly virtues;"—here she laughed again in her old manner at once so mocking and so sweet—"I think if he likes pancakes he had perhaps better eat them on Shrove Tuesday, but this is enough." These were the last coherent words she spoke. From that time she grew continually worse, and was never free from delirium till her death—which took place less than a fortnight afterwards, to the inexpressible grief of those who knew and loved her.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Letters had been written to Miss Pontifex's brothers and sisters, and one and all came post-haste to Roughborough. Before they arrived the poor lady was already delirious, and for the sake of her own peace at the last I am half glad she never recovered consciousness.
I had known these people all their lives, as none can know each other but those who have played together as children; I knew how they had all of them—perhaps Theobald least, but all of them more or less—made her life a burden to her until the death of her father had made her
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