Why not try?
Any thing; we will consent to any thing, if only we can see your life busy and useful and happy." Thus she talked, feeling far more tenderly to him in his forlorn despondency than when they had quitted the house two hours before.
But Ascott took not the slightest notice.

A strange fit of sullenness or depression seemed to have come over him, which, when they reached home and met Aunt Johanna's silently-questioning face, changed into devil-may-care indifference.
"Oh yes, aunt, we've done it; we've got the money, and now I may go to the dogs as soon as I like." "No," said Aunt Hilary, "it is nothing of the sort: it is only that Ascott must now depend upon himself, and not upon his godfather.

Take courage," she added, and went up to him and kissed him on the forehead; "we'll never let our boy go to the dogs! and as for this disappointment, or any disappointment, why it's just like a cold bath, it takes away your breath for the time, and then you rise up out of it brisker and fresher than ever." But Ascott shook his head with a fierce denial.

"Why should that old fellow be as rich as Croesus and I as poor as a rat?
Why should I be put into the world to enjoy myself, and can't?
Why was I made like what I am, and then punished for it?
Whose fault is it ?" Ay, whose?
The eternal, unsolvable problem rose up before Hilary's imagination.

The ghastly spectre of that everlasting doubt, which haunts even the firmest faith sometimes--and which all the nonsense written about that mystery which, "Binding nature fate to fate, Leaves free the human will," only makes darker than before--oppressed her for the time being with an inexpressible dread.
Ay, why was it that the boy was what he was?
From his inherited nature, his temperament, or his circumstances?
What, or more awful question still, who was to blame?
But as Hilary's thoughts went deeper down the question answered itself--at least as far as it ever can be answered in this narrow, finite stage of being.