Through him too was encouraged a native love of poetry, of which in her childhood her memory acquired a stock which never failed her, and which had often cheered her lonely hours by successive cradles.

She had a fine natural gift of recitation, and in evening hours when the home was particularly united in some glow of visitors or birthday celebration, she would be persuaded to recall some of those old songs and simple apologues, with such charm that even her husband, to whom verse was naturally an incomprehensible triviality, was visibly softened, and perhaps, deep in the sadness of his silent nature, moved to a passing realisation of a certain something kind and musical in life which he had strangely missed.
This greater breadth of temperament and training enabled Mary Mesurier to understand and make allowances for the narrower and harder nature of her husband, whom she learnt in time rather to pity for the bleakness of his early days, than to condemn for their effect upon his character.

He was strong, good, clever, and handsome, and exceptionally all those four good reasons for loving him; and the intellectual sympathy, the sharing of broader interests, which she sometimes missed in him, she had for some three or four years come to find in her eldest son, who, to his father's bewilderment and disappointment, had reincarnated his own strong will, in connection with literary practices and dreams which threatened to end in his becoming a poet, instead of the business man expected of him, for which development that love of poetry in one parent, and a certain love of books in both, was no doubt to some degree guiltily responsible.
James Mesurier, as we have said, was no judge of poetry; and, had he been so, a reading of his son's early effusions would have made him still more obdurate in the choice for him of a commercial career; but on general principles he was quite sufficiently firm against any but the most non-committing, leisure-hour flirtation with the Muse.

The mother, while agreeing with the father's main proposition of the undesirability, nay, impossibility, of literature as a livelihood,--had not the great and successful Sir Walter himself described it as a good walking-stick, but a poor crutch; a stick applied, since its first application as an image, to the shoulders of how many generations of youthful genius,--was naturally more sympathetic towards her son's ambition, and encouraged it to the extent of helping from her housekeeping money the formation of his little library, even occasionally proving successful in winning sums of money from the father for the purchase of some book specially, as the young man would declare, necessary for his development.
As this little library had outgrown the accommodation of the common rooms, a daring scheme had been conceived between mother and son,--no less than that he should have a small room set apart for himself as a study.

When first broached to the father, this scheme had met with an absolute denial that seemed to promise no hope of further consideration; but the mother, accepting defeat at the time, had tried again and again, with patient dexterity at favourable moments, till at last one proud day the little room, with its bookshelves, a cast of Dante, and a strange picture or two, was a beautiful, significant fact--all ready for the possible visitation of the Muse.
In such ways had the mother negotiated the needs of all her children; though the youth of the rest--save the eldest girl, whose music lessons had meant a battle, and whose growing attractiveness for the boys of the district, and one in particular, was presently to mean another--made as yet but small demands.