“Just because nothing lasts that has its origin in ignorance. The boy has seen nothing of life, has had no opportunity for forming a judgment or instituting a comparison between any two objects. The first shot that breaches that same fortress of belief, down will come the whole edifice!”
“You 'd give a lad to the Jesuits, then, to be trained up in every artifice and distrust?”
“Far from it, Harcourt. I think their system a mistake all through. The science of life must be self-learned, and it is a slow acquisition. All that education can do is to prepare the mind to receive it. Now, to employ the first years of a boy's life by storing him with prejudices, is just to encumber a vessel with a rotten cargo that she must throw overboard before she can load with a profitable freight.”
“And is it in that category you'd class his love for his father?” asked the Colonel.
“Of course not; but any unnatural or exaggerated estimate of him is a great error, to lead to an equally unfair depreciation when the time of deception is past. To be plain, Harcourt, is that boy fitted to enter one of our great public schools, stand the hard, rough usage of his own equals, and buffet it as you or I have done?”
“Why not? or, at least, why should n't he become so after a month or two?”
“Just because in that same month or two he'd either die broken-hearted, or plunge his knife into the heart of some comrade who insulted him.”
“Not a bit of it. You don't know him at all. Charley is a fine give-and-take fellow; a little proud, perhaps, because he lives apart from all that are his equals. Let Glencore just take courage to send him to Harrow or Rugby, and my life on it, but he 'll be the manliest fellow in the school.”
“I 'll undertake, without Harrow or Rugby, that the boy should become something even greater than that,” said Upton, smiling.
“Oh, I know you sneer at my ideas of what a young fellow ought to be,” said Harcourt; “but, somehow, you did not neglect these same pursuits yourself. You can shoot as well as most men, and you ride better than any I know of.”