Once, just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as so incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife and the dear girls?
He transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me in his deep solemn voice to remember the "well-established fact" that genius was not transmissible.
I said only "Oh! Isn't it ?" and he thought he had silenced me by an unanswerable argument.

But he continued to talk of his glorious father- in-law, and it was in the course of that conversation that he told me how, when the Liverpool relations of the poet's late wife naturally addressed themselves to him in considerable concern, suggesting a friendly consultation as to the boy's future, the incensed (but always refined) poet wrote in answer a letter of mere polished _badinage_ which offended mortally the Liverpool people.

This witty outbreak of what was in fact mortification and rage appeared to them so heartless that they simply kept the boy.

They let him go to sea not because he was in their way but because he begged hard to be allowed to go.
"Oh! You do know," said Mrs.Fyne after a pause.

"Well--I felt myself very much abandoned.