“I suppose Jonathan and thysen could manage for a week without me?”
“We would do our best. Nothing could go far wrong in a week. This is the twenty-fifth of January, father. Parliament opens on the twenty-ninth. London was getting crowded with the new fellows as Faith and I came through it. They were crowding the hotels, and showing themselves off as the ‘Reformed Parliament.’ I would have enjoyed hearing thee set them down a peg or two.”
Then the old fire blazed in the squire’s eyes, and he said, “I’ll be off to-morrow afternoon, Dick. I’m glad thou told me. If there’s anything I hev a contempt for it is a conceited upstart. I’ll turn any of that crowd down to the bottom of their class;” and the squire who left the Pomfret house that night was a very different man from the squire who entered it that afternoon.
Two days afterwards the squire was off to London. He went first to the Clarendon and sent word to his sister of his arrival. She answered his note in person within an hour. “My dear, dear lad!” she cried. “My carriage is at the door and we will go straight home.”
“No, we won’t, Josepha. I want a bit of freedom. I want to go and come as I like. I want to stay in the House of Commons all night long, if the new members are passing compliments on each other’s records and abilities. I hev come up to London to feel what it’s like to do as I please, and above all, not to be watched and cared for.”
“I know, Antony! I know! Some men are too happily married. In my opinion, it is the next thing to being varry—-”
“I mean nothing wrong, Josepha. I only want to be let alone a bit until I find mysen.”
“Find thysen?”
“To be sure. Here’s our medical man at the mill telling me ‘I hev what he calls nerves.’ I hevn’t! Not I! I’m a bit tired of the days being all alike. I’d enjoy a bit of a scolding from Annie now for lying in bed half the morning, and as sure as I hev a varry important engagement at the mill, I hear the hounds, and the view, holloa! and it is as much as I can do to hold mysen in my chair. It is that thou doesn’t understand, I suppose.”
“I do understand. I hev the same feeling often. I want to do things I would do if I was only a man. Do exactly as thou feels to do, Antony, while the mill is out of sight and hearing.”