Then there was roast goose for dinner, and Clara amused herself by making silly facetious¹ faces, furtively², dangerously, under her father’s very eyes. The children feared goose for their father, whose digestion³ was usually unequal to this particular bird. Like many fathers of families in the Five Towns, he had the habit of going forth⁴ on Saturday mornings to the butcher’s or the poulterer’s and buying Sunday’s dinner. He was a fairly good judge of a joint⁵, but Maggie considered herself to be his superior in this respect. However, Darius was not prepared to learn from Maggie, and his purchases had to be accepted without criticism. At a given meal Darius would never admit that anything chosen and bought by him was not perfect; but a week afterwards, if the fact was so, he would of his own accord recall imperfections in that which he had asserted to be perfect; and he would do this without any shame, without any apparent sense of inconsistency or weakness. Edwin noticed a similar trait in other grown-up persons, and it astonished him. It astonished him especially in his father, who, despite the faults and vulgarities which his fastidious son could find in him, always impressed Edwin as a strong man, a man with the heroic quality of not caring too much what other people thought.