“I expect that is all my father would allow. In spite of the colonies, he has all the old notions about women, and would do nothing Aunt Lily really protested against.”
“You are lucky to have a definite plan and notion to work for. Now fate was so unkind as to make me a country squire, and not only that, but one bound down, like Gulliver among the Liliputians, with all manner of cords by all the dear good excellent folks, who look on that old mediaeval den with a kind of fetish-worship, sprung of their having been kept out of it so long, and it would be an utter smash of all their hearts if I uttered a profane word against it. I would as soon be an ancient Egyptian drowning a cat as move a stone of it. It is a lovely sort of ancient Pompeii, good to look at now and then, but not to be bound down to.”
“Like Beechcroft Court, a fossil. It is very well there are such places.”
“Yes, but not to be the hope of them. It is my luck. If my eldest uncle, who had toiled in a bookseller’s shop all his youth and reigned like a little king, had not gone and got killed in a boating accident, there he would be the ruling Sir Roger de Coverley of the county, a pillar of Church and State, and I should be a free man.”
“Won’t they let you go about, and see everything?”
“Oh yes, I am welcome to do a little globe-trotting. They are no fools; if they were I should not care half so much; but wherever I went, there would be a series of jerks from my string, and not having an integument of rhinoceros hide, I could not disregard them without a sore more raw than I care to carry about. After all, it is only a globe, and one gets back to the same place again.”
“Men have so many openings.”
“I’m not rich enough for Parliament, and if I were, maybe it would be worse for their hearts,” he said, with a sigh.
“There’s journalism, a great power.”
“Yes, but to put my name to all I could—and long to say—would be an equal horror to the dear folks.”