His wife had been a hard, worldly,
well-connected woman, who presented him with two unnatural children,
a girl and a boy, and grew harder, more worldly, less handsome, in the
process. The migration to Liverpool, which took place when he was sixty
and she forty-two, broke what she still had of heart, but she lingered
on twelve years, finding solace in bridge, and being haughty towards
Liverpool. Old Heythorp saw her to her rest without regret. He had
felt no love for her whatever, and practically none for her two
children--they were in his view colourless, pragmatical, very unexpected
characters. His son Ernest--in the Admiralty--he thought a poor, careful
stick. His daughter Adela, an excellent manager, delighting in spiritual
conversation and the society of tame men, rarely failed to show him that
she considered him a hopeless heathen. They saw as little as need be of
each other. She was provided for under that settlement he had made on
her mother fifteen years ago, well before the not altogether unexpected
crisis in his affairs. Very different was the feeling he had bestowed
on that son of his "under the rose." The boy, who had always gone by his
mother's name of Larne, had on her death been sent to some relations of
hers in Ireland, and there brought up.
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