HUGH NEVILLE was fond of tender and minute retrospect, and often indulged himself, in lonely hours, with the meditative pleasures of memory. To look back into the old years was to him like gazing into a misty place, with sudden and bright glimpses, and then the cloud closed in again but it was not only with his own life that he concerned himself he liked to trace in fancy his fathers eager boyhood, brought up as he had been in a great manufac- turing town, by a mother of straitened means, who yet maintained, among all her ...
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HUGH NEVILLE was fond of tender and minute retrospect, and often indulged himself, in lonely hours, with the meditative pleasures of memory. To look back into the old years was to him like gazing into a misty place, with sudden and bright glimpses, and then the cloud closed in again but it was not only with his own life that he concerned himself he liked to trace in fancy his fathers eager boyhood, brought up as he had been in a great manufac- turing town, by a mother of straitened means, who yet maintained, among all her restrictions, a careful tradition of gentle blood and honourable descent. The children of that household had been nurtured with no luxuries and few enjoyments. Everypound of the small income had had its appointed use but being, as they were, ardent, emotional natures, they had contrived to extract the best kind of pleasure out x 2 Beside Still Waters of books, art, and music and the only trace that survived in Hughs father of the old narrow days, was a deep-seated hatred of waste- fulness and luxury, which, in aman of generous nature, produced certain anomalies, hard for his children, living in comparative wealth and ease, to interpret. His father, the boy observed, was liberal to a fault in large matters, but scrupulously and needlessly particular about small ex- penses. He would take the children on a foreign tour, and then practise an elaborate species of discomfort, in an earnest endeavour to save some minute disbursements. He would give his son a magnificent book, and chide him because he cut, instead of untying, the string of the parcel. Long after, the boy, disentangling his fathers early life in diaries and letters, would wish, with a wistful regret, that he hadonly had the clue to this earlier he would have sympathised, he beneath the little thought, with the idea that lay economies, instead of fretting over them, and discussing them rebelliously with his sisters. His father was a man of almost passionate af- fections there was nothing in the world that he more desired than the company and the sym- pathy of his children but he had, besides this, an intense and tremulous sense of responsi- bility towards them. He attached an undue importance to small indications of character The Family and thus the children were seldom at ease with their father, because he rebuked them con- stantly, and found frequent fault, doing almost violence to his tenderness, not from any pleasure in censoriousness, but from a terror, that was almost morbid, of the consequences of the unchecked development of minute tendencies. Hughs mother was of a very different disposition she was fully as affectionate as his father, but of a brighter, livelier, more facile nature she came of a wealthy family, and had never known the hard discipline from which his father had suffered. She was a good many years younger than her husband they 3 were united by the intensest affection but while she devoted herself to him with a perfect understand- ing of, and sympathywith, his somewhat jealous and puritanical nature, she did not escape the severity of his sense of responsibility, and his natural instinct for attempting to draw those nearest tohim into the circle of his high, if rigid, standards...
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Seller's Description:
PLEASE NOTE, WE DO NOT SHIP TO DENMARK. New Book. Shipped from UK in 4 to 14 days. Established seller since 2000. Please note we cannot offer an expedited shipping service from the UK.
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Good + Hardback, no dust-wrapper. 356pp. 1st edition 1907. Extremities slightly worn. Faint indentation to rear board. Foxing to first and last few pages. Private ownership. (h12)
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Good. No Jacket. Hardcover Fiction Fiction: A novel by the author of "The Upton Letters. " In good shape for its age, except that the front is begining to separate from the spine.
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Seller's Description:
Very Good. Size: 0x0x0; 1ST EDITION-GOLD EDGE ON TOP-ONE PAGE IS LOOSE IN FRONT OF BOOK-NO DJ *** light shelf wear-No marks on text-My shelf location-so-e-43*
