The Tree of Knowledge

I

It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter
Brench that his main success in life would have consisted in his never
having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his
friend Morgan Mallow. This was a subject on which it was, to the
best of his belief, impossible with veracity to quote him, and it was
nowhere on record that he had, in the connexion, on any occasion and
in any embarrassment, either lied or spoken the truth. Such a triumph
had its honour even for a man of other triumphs--a man who had reached
fifty, who had escaped marriage, who had lived within his means, who
had been in love with Mrs Mallow for years without breathing it, and
who, last but not least, had judged himself once for all. He had so
judged himself in fact that he felt an extreme and general humility
to be his proper portion; yet there was nothing that made him think
so well of his parts as the course he had steered so often through the
shallows just mentioned. It became thus a real wonder that the friends
in whom he had most confidence were just those with whom he had
most reserves. He couldn't tell Mrs Mallow--or at least he supposed,
excellent man, he couldn't--that she was the one beautiful reason he
had never married; any more than he could tell her husband that the
sight of the multiplied marbles in that gentleman's studio was an
affliction of which even time had never blunted the edge. His victory,
however, as I have intimated, in regard to these productions, was not
simply in his not having let it out that he deplored them; it was,
remarkably, in his not having kept it in by anything else.

The whole situation, among these good people, was verily a marvel, and
there was probably not such another for a long way from the spot that
engages us--the point at which the soft declivity of Hampstead began
at that time to confess in broken accents to Saint John's Wood.
He despised Mallow's statues and adored Mallow's wife, and yet was
distinctly fond of Mallow, to whom, in turn, he was equally dear. Mrs
Mallow rejoiced in the statues--though she preferred, when pressed,
the busts; and if she was visibly attached to Peter Brench it was
because of his affection for Morgan. Each loved the other moreover for
the love borne in each case to Lancelot, whom the Mallows respectively
cherished as their only child and whom the friend of their fireside
identified as the third--but decidedly the handsomest--of his godsons.
Already in the old years it had come to that--that no one, for such
a relation, could possibly have occurred to any of them, even to the
baby itself, but Peter. There was luckily a certain independence, of
the pecuniary sort, all round: the Master could never otherwise have
spent