Lachlan Beattie Character Analysis

After a time the man began to grunt, then to gabble as if in protest, but when Lachlan put the stick into his spine, moved on faster, producing sounds of such eager submissiveness that the boy’s heart swelled. He had a powerful sense of the springing of his torso from the roots of his belly.

The struggle between them was fierce. Till Lachlan came, [Janet] had been used to going her own way, unconditioned and free. She had no limit to herself. Now she resented his easy assumption that he was superior, should take the lead in all their doings, and that she must naturally yield to him.

[Ellen] lived in the demands of the moment, in the girls, in Lachlan, and was too high-spirited, too independent, to care whether other women approved of her.

[Lachlan] was sorry for it. But it was absurd to have Gemmy always tagging at his heels, and he blushed now to recall a time when he regarded it as a sign of his power. How puffed up he had been with his own importance! What a fool he must have appeared to the very fellows he had meant to impress!

Something had been destroyed in [Jock] that could not be put right. [Lachlan] watched his uncle drift back after a time to his friends, to Barney Mason, Jim Sweetman, but the days of unselfconscious trust in his standing among them, and the belief that to be thought well of by such fellows was the first thing in the world, were gone.

Sir George, [Mr. Frazer] decides, exudes a magnificent air of unreality that includes everything he looks upon. He has got close enough to feel its disintegrating effect in every part of him.

[Janet] was surprised, reading his letter, by its courtesy, its tentativeness, its tenderness she might have said, and recalling her own prickly tone felt foolish.

“I sometimes think that that was all I ever knew of him: what struck me in that moment before I knew him at all. When he was up there [on the fence] before he fell, poor fellow, and became just—there’s nothing clear in my head of what he might have been before that, and afterwards he was just Gemmy, someone we loved.”

After a time the man began to grunt, then to gabble as if in protest, but when Lachlan put the stick into his spine, moved on faster, producing sounds of such eager submissiveness that the boy’s heart swelled. He had a powerful sense of the springing of his torso from the roots of his belly.

The struggle between them was fierce. Till Lachlan came, [Janet] had been used to going her own way, unconditioned and free. She had no limit to herself. Now she resented his easy assumption that he was superior, should take the lead in all their doings, and that she must naturally yield to him.

[Ellen] lived in the demands of the moment, in the girls, in Lachlan, and was too high-spirited, too independent, to care whether other women approved of her.

[Lachlan] was sorry for it. But it was absurd to have Gemmy always tagging at his heels, and he blushed now to recall a time when he regarded it as a sign of his power. How puffed up he had been with his own importance! What a fool he must have appeared to the very fellows he had meant to impress!

Something had been destroyed in [Jock] that could not be put right. [Lachlan] watched his uncle drift back after a time to his friends, to Barney Mason, Jim Sweetman, but the days of unselfconscious trust in his standing among them, and the belief that to be thought well of by such fellows was the first thing in the world, were gone.

Sir George, [Mr. Frazer] decides, exudes a magnificent air of unreality that includes everything he looks upon. He has got close enough to feel its disintegrating effect in every part of him.

[Janet] was surprised, reading his letter, by its courtesy, its tentativeness, its tenderness she might have said, and recalling her own prickly tone felt foolish.

“I sometimes think that that was all I ever knew of him: what struck me in that moment before I knew him at all. When he was up there [on the fence] before he fell, poor fellow, and became just—there’s nothing clear in my head of what he might have been before that, and afterwards he was just Gemmy, someone we loved.”