James'
grotto with a careless penny.
The fact that all the other little boys and girls called the Missioner
Father made it hard for Mark to understand his own more particular
relationship to him, and Lidderdale was so much afraid of showing any
more affection to one child of his flock than to another that he was
less genial with his own son than with any of the other children. It was
natural that in these circumstances Mark should be even more dependent
than most solitary children upon his mother, and no doubt it was through
his passion to gratify her that he managed to avoid that Cockney accent.
His father wanted his first religious instruction to be of the communal
kind that he provided in the Sunday School. One might have thought that
he distrusted his wife's orthodoxy, so strongly did he disapprove of her
teaching Mark by himself in the nursery.
"It's the curse of the day," he used to assert, "this pampering of
children with an individual religion. They get into the habit of
thinking God is their special property and when they get older and find
he isn't, as often as not they give up religion altogether, because it
doesn't happen to fit in with the spoilt notions they got hold of as
infants."
Mark's bringing up was the only thing in which Mrs.
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