It was much more pleasant.

Genius is not hereditary but temperament may be.

And he was the son of a poet with an admirable gift of individualising, of etherealizing the common-place; of making touching, delicate, fascinating the most hopeless conventions of the, so-called, refined existence.
What I could not understand was Mrs.Fyne's dog-in-the-manger attitude.
Sentimentally she needed that brother of hers so little! What could it matter to her one way or another--setting aside common humanity which would suggest at least a neutral attitude.

Unless indeed it was the blind working of the law that in our world of chances the luckless _must_ be put in the wrong somehow.
And musing thus on the general inclination of our instincts towards injustice I met unexpectedly, at the turn of the road, as it were, a shape of duplicity.

It might have been unconscious on Mrs.Fyne's part, but her leading idea appeared to me to be not to keep, not to preserve her brother, but to get rid of him definitely.