Occasionally his
mother wanted him to accompany her for a call, but he avoided yielding
as much as possible, and generally with success; for this was one of the
claims of social convention against which he steadily rebelled--the more
determinedly that in none of his mother's friends could he take the
smallest interest; for she was essentially a commonplace because
ambitious woman, without a spark of aspiration, and her friends were of
the same sort, without regard for anything but what was--or, at least,
they supposed to be--the fashion. Indeed, it was hard to understand how
Hector came ever to be born of such a woman, although in truth she was
of as pure Celtic origin as her husband--only blood is not spirit, and
that is often clearly manifest. His father, on the other hand, was not
without some signs of an imagination--quite undeveloped, indeed, and,
I believe, suppressed by the requirements of his business relations.
At the same time, Hector knew that he cherished not a little indignation
against the insolence of the good Dr. Johnson in regard to both Ossian
and his humble translator, Macpherson, upholding the genuineness of
both, although unable to enter into and set forth the points of the
argument on either side. As to Hector, he reveled in the ancient
traditions of his family, and not unfrequently in his earlier youth had
made an attempt to re-embody some of its legends into English, vain as
regarded the retention of the special airiness and suggestiveness of
their vaguely showing symbolism, for often he dropped his pen with a
sigh of despair at the illusiveness of the special aroma of the Celtic
imagination.
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