Peter might justly have complained that his birth was too calmly received. For Peter\'s mother accepted him without demur. Women who nurse themselves more thoroughly than they nurse their babies will incredulously hear that Mrs. Paragon made little difference in her life on Peter\'s account until within four hours of his coming. Nevertheless Peter was a healthy baby, shapeless and mottled.

Mrs. Paragon was tall and fair, with regular features and eyes set well apart. They looked at you candidly, and you were aware of their friendly interest. They perfectly expressed the simplicity and peace of her character. She was mild and immovable; with a strength that was felt by all who dealt with her, though she rarely asserted it. She had the slow, deep life of a mother.

Mr. Paragon was at all points contrasted. He was short, and already at this time he was stout. He had had no teaching; but he was not an ignorant man. He was naturally of an active mind; and he had read extensively the literature that suited his habit of reflection.

Mr. Paragon was the son of a small tradesman, and had by the death of his parents been thrown[Pg 2] upon the London streets. After ten years he had emerged as a managing clerk.

Had Mr. Paragon been well treated he might have reached his fortieth year sunny and charitable, with a cheerful faith in people and institutions. But living a celibate life, insufficiently fed, shabbily clothed, and never doubting his mental superiority to prosperous employers, he had naturally adopted extremely bitter views of the world.

Surmounting a shelf of Mr. Paragon\'s favourite books was a plaster bust of Bradlaugh. The shelf itself included Tom Paine\'s Rights of Man, Godwin\'s Political Justice, and the works of Voltaire in forty English volumes. Mr. Paragon talked the language of Godwin\'s philosophic day. Priests, kings, aristocracies, and governments were his familiar bogies. He went every Sunday to a Labour church where extracts from Shelley and Samuel Butler were read by the calendar; and he was a successful orator of a powerful group of rebels among the railwaymen.

Mr. Paragon was more Falstaff than Cassius to the eye. There was something a little ludicrous in Mr. Paragon, with legs well apart, hands deep in his trousers, demonstrating that religion was a device of government for the deception of simple men, and that property was theft.

Mrs. Paragon loved her husband, and ignored his opinions. He on his side found rest after the bitterness of his early years in the shelter of her[Pg 3] wisdom. His anarchism became more and more an intellectual indulgence. Gradually the edge was taken from his temper. He began to enjoy his grievances now that they no longer pinched him. His charity, in a way that charity has, extended with his circumference. He was earning ￡4 a week, and he had in his wife a housekeeper who could make ￡4 cover the work of ￡6. Mrs. Paragon did not, like many of her friends, overtask an incompetent drudge at ￡10 a year. She saved her money, and halved her labour. Ends met; and things were decently in order. Mr. Paragon was happy; insured against reasonable disaster; with sufficient energy and spirit left at the end of a day\'s work to take himself seriously as a citizen and a man.

There were times when Mr. Paragon took himself very seriously indeed. On the evening of the day when Mr. Samuel, curate of the parish, called to urge Mrs. Paragon to have Peter christened, Mr. Paragon talked so incisively that only his wife could have guessed how little he intended.

"No priests," he said. "That\'s final."

He looked in fierce dispute at Mrs. Paragon; but meeting her calm eyes, looked hastily away at Peter, who was sleeping by the fire in a clothes basket.

Mrs. Paragon was dishing up the evening meal; and Mr. Paragon saw that a reasonably large pie-dish had appeared from the oven, from which arose a browned pyramid of sliced [Pg 4]potatoes. The kitchen was immediately filled with a savour only to be associated with Mr. Paragon\'s favourite supper.

Mrs. Paragon ignored the eagerness with which he drew to the table. Shepherd\'s pie is a simple thing, but not as Mrs. Paragon made it. Mr. Paragon, as he spooned generously into the steaming dish, had forgotten Mr. Samuel till Mrs. Paragon reminded him.

"Mr. Samuel," she said, "is only doing his duty."

Mr. Paragon washed down a large mouthful of pie with small beer. Another mouthful was cooling upon the end of his fork.

"Who made it his duty?" he asked.

Mrs. Paragon never answered these rhetorical questions; and Mr. Paragon added, after a mouthful:

"There are honest jobs."

"Yes, dear; but Mr. Samuel believes in christening."

"Perhaps he does. Mr. Samuel believes that the animals went in two by two."

There was a long pause. Then Mrs. Paragon left the table to serve a large suet pudding studded with raisins.

She dealt with it in silence. Mr. Paragon, as always on these occasions when they were pulling different ways, felt as if he were trying to make waves in a pool by blowing upon the surface. He could never more than superficially ruffle the spirit[Pg 5] of his wife. He was obscurely aware that she had inexhaustible reserves.

The meal concluded without further conversation; but, when Mr. Paragon had eaten more than was good for him, he began to feel that impulsive necessity to be generous which invariably overtook him sooner or later in his differences with Mrs. Paragon. He looked at her amiably:

"I see it like this," he said. "Mr. Samuel thinks he\'s right. But he\'s not going to stuff it into my boy. I\'m an independent man, and I think for myself."

"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Paragon. "I don\'t know whether Mr. Samuel is right or wrong. I want to do the best for Peter."

Mr. Paragon looked sharply at his wife. She was sitting comfortably beside the clothes basket, resting for the first time since seven o\'clock in the morning. There was not the remotest suggestion that she was resisting him. Nevertheless Mr. Paragon was aware of a passive antagonism. He was sure she wanted Peter to be christened; he was also sure that none of his very reasonable views affected her in the least degree.

He was right. Mrs. Paragon liked to hear her husband talk. But logic did not count in her secure world. She knew only what she wanted and felt. Calm and unutterable sense was all her genius; and Mr. Paragon felt, rather than knew, that his books and opinions were feathers in the scale.

[Pg 6]

"If Peter isn\'t christened," Mrs. Paragon softly pursued, "he\'ll be getting ideas into his head. I want him to start like other boys. Let him find out for himself whether Mr. Samuel\'s right or wrong. If you keep Peter away from Church he\'ll think there\'s something wrong with it."

"Something wrong with it!" exploded Mr. Paragon. "I\'ll tell you what\'s wrong with it."

Mr. Paragon proceeded to do so at some length. Mrs. Paragon was quite content to see Mr. Paragon spending his force. Mr. Paragon talked for a long time, ending in firm defiance.

"I don\'t see a son of mine putting pennies into the plate for the clergyman\'s Easter Holiday Fund," he noisily concluded. "When my son is old enough to read Genesis, he\'ll be old enough to read the Origin of Species and the works of Voltaire."

Thereafter he sat for the rest of the evening by the kitchen fire reading his favourite volume of the forty—the adventures of Candide and of Pangloss.

But for a few moments the reading was interrupted, for Peter suddenly woke and yelled for food. As Mrs. Paragon sat with the child, Mr. Paragon had never felt more conscious of her serenity, of her immovable strength, of her eternity. He watched her over the pages of his book.

When he again looked into the adventures of[Pg 7] Candide they had lost something of their zest. He wondered between the lines whether the patriarch of Ferney would have written with quite so definite an assurance and clarity if once he had looked into the eyes of Mrs. Paragon.

A few days later Peter was christened at the local church.