You should have heard Bridget defending you! _Such_
a champion. If you want a witness to character for your
references you should call _her_! She is loud in your
praise.
_October_ 22.
There is one thing I want to tell you; and it is easier to
write it than say it. Your mother did not die when you were
three years old--much worse: she left me--ran away with an
engineer who was tracing out the branch railway. He seemed a
nice young fellow and I had him often up at the Vicarage,
and _that_ was the way he repaid my hospitality! He wrote to
me a year afterwards asking me to divorce her. As though a
Clergyman of the Church of England could do such a thing! I
had offered to take her back--not then--it would have been a
mockery--but by putting advertisements into the South Wales
papers. But after her paramour's letter--which I did not
answer--I never heard any more about her....
["Damn it all," said David to himself at this juncture of the
letter--he was training himself to swear in a moderate, gentlemanly
way--"Damn it all! Whatever I do, it seems I _cannot_ come from
altogether respectable stock."...]
You grew up therefore without a mother's care, though good
Bridget did her best. When you were a child I fear I rather
neglected you.
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