“Are you quite sure of this, Mr. Ravenor?” I ventured to ask. “My mother always spoke to me as though we were poor.”
“I do not make mistakes,” he answered, pausing in his walk and looking down upon me from his great height with knitted brows and piercing eyes, “least of all in matters of such importance. How much the exact sum will amount to I cannot tell yet, but it is more than twenty thousand pounds, so you will be able to choose your own profession. What will it be, I wonder—the Bar, the Army, the Church, agriculture? Come, you are a boy of imagination and have never been in love. You must have had day-dreams of some sort. Whither have they led you?”
“Not to any of the professions which you have mentioned,” I answered promptly.
“Then where? Tell me. I am curious to know.”
“My ideas have always been very vague,” I said slowly. “I should like to live quite away from any town, to read a good deal, and to spend the rest of my time out of doors; and then, perhaps, after a time, I might try to think something out and put it into words.”
“In short, you would like to be an author,” Mr. Ravenor broke in, with a slight smile.
“Yes; but I should not want to write to amuse people, or to become famous,” I went on, encouraged by Mr. Ravenor’s gravity. “I should like to make people think. I should like to make them turn aside from the groove of their daily life and realise that the world is full of greater and higher things than mere material prosperity. Men seem to me to find their daily work and pleasure too absorbing. They think of themselves and others only as individuals, never as limbs of a great common humanity with a mighty destiny. The world grows narrower and narrower for them as they grow older, instead of broader and broader. It is because they neglect the use of their imagination—at least, so it seems to me.”
“Have you read Hibbet’s little pamphlets?” Mr. Ravenor asked.
“Both of them,” I answered. “I like his ideas.”
“Have your clothes come from Torchester?” he inquired, with apparent irrelevance.