It almost startled Henry on his first introduction to this family of two daughters and two brothers, where the father was rather like a brother grown prematurely bald, and the stepmother supplied with monumental dignity that element of solemnity without which no properly regulated household is complete, to notice the _camaraderie_ which prevailed amongst them all.

Jokes were flying about from one to another all the time, and the father made a point of capping them all.

This was home in a liberal sense which the word had never meant to Henry.

Doubtless, it had its own individual restrictions and censorships; but its surface was at all events debonair, and it was serviceable to Henry as revealing the existence of more genial social climates than that in which he had been nurtured--though in making the comparison with his own atmosphere, he realised that this _bonhomie_ was nothing more important than a grace.
Perhaps, nay, very surely, the seriousness, even the severity of, his own training, had been among the very conditions needed to make him what he some day hoped to be, though they had seemed so purposely inimical.
Had James Mesurier's religion been more free and easy, a matter less personally assured and momentous, his son's almost oppressive sense of the spiritual significance of existence had been less radiant and constantly supporting.

Life might have gained in superficial liveableness; but it would have lost in intensity, in real importance, and with that loss would have gone too Henry's chance of being a poet." The poet in a golden clime was born!"-- once and again, maybe, but more often he comes from a land of iron and tears.
It is in the nature of things that Henry should begin to appreciate the services of his home to his development at the moment when he was leaving it.