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moral improvement of everybody and everything, obtained an insight into aspects of life that are usually kept decently covered up. Not being as wise as she believed herself to be, and seeing results without understanding causes, she was firmly convinced that all men were brutes. She asserted her belief so often that the natural brutality of man became the basic axiom of her life.
She was determined, therefore, that her son would grow up an exception, and took measures accordingly. It was the boy's hard luck that; as an only child, she was able to devote her entire attention to him while she was not otherwise engaged in reforming society.
To give her her due, she was well equipped for the job. It would have been better for Tydvil perhaps had she not been entitled to sign herself M.A. By the time he was aged eighteen years he was better furnished educationally than thousands of public school boys. Otherwise the results of his home training were deplorable beyond words.
He knew no other boys of his age except at long range. His only sport was tennis played with serious-minded seniors of either sex on the family court. On the rare occasions when he came into contact with youths of his own age, he could not understand them. He considered their outlook on life to be sinful. Their opinion of him, expressed with the freedom of youth, was far from flattering.
On one occasion, after reflecting on their manners and customs to two amazed boys, he only escaped gathering the full harvest of his temerity by one restraining the other on the plea that it was impossible to strike a lady. They parted with him after giving him a brief, but lurid, summary of his character that left him pink to the ears.
The truth was, that at this age, a more intolerable and obnoxious young prig than Tydvil Jones could not have been found outside the pages of "Sanford and Merton," a literary masterpiece that is, fortunately, forgotten by the present generation.