'Nor to one's boys going out into the world,' said Ethel: both of them talking as if she had been his wife, rather than one of these fly-away younglings herself.
'Ah! well,' he said, 'it's very pretty while it lasts, and one keeps the creatures; but after all, one doesn't rear them for one's own pleasure. That only comes by the way of their chance good-will to one.'
'For shame, Doctor!' said Ethel, pretending to shake him by the collar.
'I was thinking,' he added, 'that we must not require too much. People must have their day, and in their own fashion; and I wish you would tell Tom—I've no patience to do it myself—that I don't mean to hamper him. As long as it is a right line, he may take whichever he pleases, and I'll do my best to set him forward in it; but it is a pity—'
'Perhaps a few years of travelling, or of a professorship, might give him time to think differently,' said Ethel.
'Not he,' said the Doctor; 'the more a man lives in the world, the more he depends on it. Where is the boy? is he gone without vouchsafing a good-bye?'
'Oh no, he has taken pity on Annie and Caroline Cheviot's famine of croquet, and gone with them to the gardens.'
'A spice of flirtation never comes amiss to him.'
'There, that's the way!' said Ethel, half-saucily, half-caressingly; 'that poor fellow never can do right! Isn't it the very thing to keep him away from home, that we all may steal a horse, and he can't look over the wall, no, not with a telescope?'
'I can't help it, Ethel. It may be very wrong and unkind of me—Heaven forgive me if it is, and prevent me from doing the boy any harm! but I never can rid myself of a feeling of there being something behind when he seems the most straightforward. If he had only not got his grandfather's mouth and nose! And,' smiling after all—'I don't know what I said to be so scolded; all lads flirt, and you can't deny that Master Tom divided his attentions pretty freely last year between Mrs. Pugh and poor Ave Ward.'