“A sculptor—that’s rather an irregular profession.”
“Yes. Tom’s irregular, too.”
“Has he got any ability?”
“I always think he’s extremely clever,” said Ted with finality.
“Dear me, he didn’t strike me as clever at all,” said his father. “I remember he spent most of his time skating, and sitting by the fire reading old volumes of Punch.”
“I dare say I’m wrong,” said Ted. “You see, I’m very fond of him. Ah, here we are, and here’s May coming down the drive to meet us!”
If Tom had spent his time skating and reading Punch when he might have been talking to May—always supposing that May did not skate and did not read Punch with him—he was a fool. That, however, is probably sufficiently obvious already. In this case, Tom’s folly consisted in preferring even old volumes of Punch to the society and conversation of a typical English girl of the upper classes, tall, fair, slim, just at that period of her life when the blush of girlhood is growing into the light of womanhood, a girl whose destiny it clearly was to be a wife, and the mother of long-limbed boys who yearn all their boyhood to be men, and who become men, real men, at the proper time.
Ted jumped down off the dog-cart as it turned up the steep drive, leaving his father there; and the brother and sister walked up to the house together.
“Yes, it’s always the way, Ted,” she said; “you come here one day and go off the next. And you promised to be here all September!”
“Well, I shall be here nearly all September,” said he. “I’m only going to the Carlingfords’ for a week.”