To her it was the opening of the sluice-gates. She was full of maternal love, dammed up by distance and absence. She was tender and affectionate towards Eva, but her love for her daughter was pale and weak beside her feeling for her only son; and now a portion of the flow meant for far-off Charley was diverted to Jeremy. She loved and could have wept over his brave simplicity, his sincere question as to how he could speedily make five thousand pounds. He was not a fool; he knew he could not break the bank at Monte Carlo, or write a play or a novel, or get the desired sum thereby if he did; but he had the great folly which clings to men older than he was—the belief that blind impartial fortune may show special divine favour. Kate Raymore smiled and sighed.
"Have you no friends who would guarantee it—who would advance it? You could pay interest, and pay off the capital gradually," she suggested.
That was not at all Jeremy's idea.
"No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be indebted to anybody."
"But it's a pity to let the chance slip, from a feeling of that sort," she urged.
"Besides there's nobody in our family who ever had such a lot of money to spare," said Jeremy, descending to the practical. He sighed too, and acknowledged the first check to his ardent hopes, the first disillusionment, in the words: "I must wait."
When a man says that he must wait, he has begun to know something of the world. The lesson that often he must wait in vain remains behind.
"But I shall find out some way," he went on (the second lesson still unlearnt). "I've got a fortnight to give my answer in. They'll keep it open for me till then."
Eva came in, with her large learning eyes, and her early charming girl's wonder at the strength and cleverness of the young men she liked. In a very few minutes Jeremy was confident and gay, telling her how he had the prospect of a partnership in quite a little while. Oh, yes, a junior partnership, of course, and a minor share. But it ought to be worth four or five hundred a year anyhow—yes, to start with. And what it might come to—in vigorous hands, with new blood, new intellect, new energy—well, nobody could tell. Mr. Thrale's casks and vats were not really—as a potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice—comparable to Jeremy's vats and mordants and muriates. Eva was wonderfully impressed, and exclaimed, in childish banter:
"I hope you'll know us still, after you're as rich as that?"