now. His continued bachelor estate was
occasioned rather by his close and engrossing
attention to the interests of his business,
and, perhaps, also to the narrow social
circle in which he lived. Pretty, uneducated,
simple young country women will
retain their power of pleasing men who
have acquired education, and made money,
and so elevated themselves far above their
original station; but the influence of education
and wealth upon the tastes of men of
this sort is inimical to the chances of the
young women of the classes in society
among which they habitually find their
associates. The women of the "well-to-
do" world are unattractive to those men
who have not been born in it. Such
men either retain the predilections of
their youth for women like those whose
girlhood they remember, or cherish ambitious
aspirations towards the inimitable, not
to be borrowed or imported, refinement of
the women of social spheres far above them.
The former was Mr. Creswell's case, in as
far as anything except business can be said
to have been active in his affairs. The
"ladies" in the Helmingham district were
utterly uninteresting to him, and he had
made that fact so evident long ago that
they had accepted it; of course regarding
him as an "oddity," and much to be
pitied; and since his nieces had taken up
their abode, on the death of their father,
Mr. Creswell's only brother, at Woolgreaves,
a matrimonial development in Mr. Creswell's
career had been regarded as an
impossibility. The owner of Woolgreaves
was voted by general feminine consent "a
dear old thing," and a very good neighbour,
and the ladies only hoped he might not
have trouble before him with "that pickle,
young Tom," and were glad to think no
poor woman had been induced to put herself
in for such a life as that of Tom's stepmother
would have been.

Mr. Creswell's only brother had belonged,
not to the "well-to-do" community, but,
on the contrary, to that of the "ne'er-do-
weels," and he had died without a shilling,
heavily in debt, and leaving two helpless
girls—sufficiently delicately nurtured to
feel their destitution with keenness amounting
to despair, and sufficiently "fashionably,"
i.e. ill-educated, to be wholly incapable
of helping themselves—to the mercy
of the world. The contemplation of this
contingency, for which he had plenty of
leisure, for he died of a lingering illness,
did not appear to have distressed Tom
Creswell. He had believed in "luck" all
his life, with the touching devotion of a
selfish man, who defines "luck" as the
making of things comfortable for himself,
and is not troubled with visions of, after
him, the modern version of the deluge,
which takes the squalid form of the
pawnbroker's, and the poor-house; and "luck"
had lasted his time. It had even survived
him, so far as his children were concerned,
for his brother, who had quarrelled with
him, more from policy and of deliberate
interest, regarding him as a hopeless spendthrift,
the helping of whom was a useless
extravagance, than from anger or disgust,
came to the aid of the widow and her
children, when he found that things were
very much worse than he had supposed
they would prove to be.

Mrs. Tom Creswell afforded a living example
of her husband's "luck." She was
a mild, gentle, very silly, very self-denying,
estimable woman, who loved the "ne'er-
do-weel" so literally with all her heart, that
when he died, she had not enough of that
organ left to go on living with. She did
not see why she should try, and she did
not try, but quietly died in a few months,
to the astonishment of rational people,
who declared that Tom Creswell was a
"good loss," and had never been of the
least use either to himself or any other
human being. What on earth was the
woman about? Was she such an idiot as
not to see his faults? Did she not know
what a selfish, idle, extravagant, worthless
fellow he was, and that he had left her to
either pauperism or dependence on any one
who would support her, quite complacently?
If such a husband as he was—
what she had seen in him beyond his
handsome face, and his pleasant manner, they
could not tell—was to be honoured in this
way, gone quite daft about, in fact; they
really could not perceive the advantage to
men in being active, industrious, saving, prudent,
and domestic. Nothing could be more
true, more reasonable, more unanswerable,
or more ineffectual. Mrs. Tom Creswell
did not dispute it; she patiently endured
much bullying by strong-minded, tract-
dropping females of the spinster persuasion;
she was quite satisfied to be told she
had proved herself unworthy of a better
husband. She did not murmur as it was
proved to her, in the fiercest forms of
accurate arithmetic, that her Tom had
squandered sums which might have provided
for her and her children decently,
and had not even practised the poor self-
denial of paying for an insurance on his