"It's so different," he went on, "when it comes to looking back on it all, when it's all behind you. But, of course, men differ too. I never meant business to the extent you do. I've done pretty well; I won't cry down what is, after all, a fine position. It was thought rather a job, by the way, making me a judge, but I was popular and what's called a good fellow, and people swallowed the job without making a fuss. But work and what it brings have never been all the world to me. I've loved too many other things, and loved them too much."
"Oh, I know I'm a climber," laughed Norton Ward. "I can't help it. I try sometimes to get up an interest in some dilettante business or other, but I just can't! I'm an infernal Philistine; all that sort of thing seems just waste of time to me."
"Well then, to you it is waste of time," said his wife.
"We must follow our natures, no help for it. And that's what one seems to have done when one looks back. One gets a little doubtful about Free Will, looking back."
"Yes, sir, but it's awfully hard to know what your nature is," Arthur interposed. He was lying on the grass, pulling up blades of it and tying them in knots for an amusement.
"It works of itself, I think, without your knowing much about it—till, as I say, you can look back."
"But then it's too late to do anything about it!"
"Well, so it is, unless eternity is an eternity of education, as some people say—a prospect which one's lower nature is inclined to regard with some alarm."
"No amount of it will quite spoil you, Sir Christopher," Esther assured him with an affectionate smile.
"If this life can't educate a man, what can?" asked Norton Ward.