And while masculine youth
strove and wrestled for places in the race, aunts and sisters and
cousins were pressing into the same arena, doing their best to crowd out
the uncles and the brothers and the nephews.
'Poor Jack,' sighed Mary, 'at the worst we can go to the Red River
country and grow corn.'
This was her favourite fancy, that she and her lover should find their
first dwelling in the new world, live as humbly as the peasants lived
round Grasmere, and patiently wait upon fortune. And yet that would not
be happiness, unless Maulevrier were to come and stay with them every
autumn. Nothing could reconcile Mary to being separated from Maulevrier
for any lengthened period.
There were hours in which she was more hopeful, and defied the
wiseacres. Clever young men had succeeded in the past--clever men whose
hair was not yet grey had come to the front in the present. Granted that
these were the exceptional men, the fine flower of humanity. Did she not
know that John Hammond was as far above average youth as Helvellyn was
above yonder mound in her grandmother's shrubbery?
Yes, he would succeed in literature, in politics, in whatever career he
had chosen for himself.
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