“That is not the point. I can easily find something to do. There’s literature. Or I could take up art. And last year there was a Hungarian Count who would have given anything to get me for a tutor.”
“Then why didn’t you go?”
“Mother, you ask me why!”
“I know you had not made up your mind to the worst, but it is a pity you missed the opportunity.”
“There will be more,” said Allen loftily. “I never meant to be a burden, but ladies are so impatient, I suppose you do not wish to turn me out instantly to seek my fortune. No, mother, I do not mean to blame you. You have been sadly harassed, and no woman can ever enter into what I have suffered. Put aside those bills. Long before Christmas, I shall be able to discharge them myself.”
So Allen wrote to Bobus’s friend at Oxford, but he of course did not keep a pocketful of Hungarian Counts. He answered one or two advertisements for a travelling tutor, and had one personal interview, the result of which was that he could have nothing to do with such insufferable snobs. He also concocted an advertisement beginning with “M.A., Oxford, accustomed to the best society and familiar with European languages,” but though the newspapers charged highly for it, he only received one answer, except those from agents, and that, he said with illimitable disgust, was from a Yankee.
Meantime he turned over his poems, and made Barbara copy out a ballad he had written for the “Traveller’s Joy” on some local tradition in the Tyrol. He offered this to a magazine, whose editor, a lady, was an occasional frequenter of Mrs. Brownlow’s evenings. The next time she came, she showed herself so much interested in the legend that Allen said he should like to show her another story, which he had written for the same domestic periodical.
“Would it serve for our Christmas number?”
“I will have it copied out and send it for you to look at,” said Allen.
“If it is at hand, I had better cast my eye over it, to judge whether it be worth while to copy it. I shall set forth on my holiday journey the day after to-morrow, and I should like to have my mind at rest about my Christmas number.”