The old lady paused with her scissors gaping, and looked shrewdly at Michael.
“I’m getting rather fed up with it,” Michael admitted. “It goes on for such a long time. It wasn’t so bad this term, though.”
Then he remembered that whatever pleasures had mitigated the exasperation of school last term were decidedly unscholastic, and he blushed.
“I simply loathed it for a time,” he added.
“Alan informs me he acquired his first eleven cap this term and will be in the first fifteen as Lord Treasurer or something,” Mrs. Carthew went on. “Naturally he must enjoy this shower of honours. Alan is decidedly typical of the better class of unthinking young Englishman. He is pleasant to look at—a little colt-like perhaps, but that will soon wear off. My own dear boy was very like him, and Maud’s dear husband was much the same. You, I’m afraid, think too much, Michael.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think very much,” said Michael, disclaiming philosophy, and greatly afraid that Mrs. Carthew was supposing him a prig.
“You needn’t be ashamed of thinking,” she said. “After all, the amount you think now won’t seriously disorganize the world. But you seem to me old for your age, much older than Alan for instance, and though your conversation with me at any rate is not mature, nevertheless you convey somehow an impression of maturity that I cannot quite account for.”
Michael could not understand why, when for the first time he was confronted with somebody who gave his precocity its due, he was unable to discuss it eagerly and voluminously, why he should half resent being considered older than Alan.
“Don’t look so cross with me,” Mrs. Carthew commanded. “I am an old woman, and I have a perfect right to say what I please to you. Besides, you and I have had many conversations, and I take a great interest in you. What are you going to be?”
“Well, that’s what I can’t find out,” said Michael desperately. “I know what I’m not going to be, and that’s all.”