It was on a Sunday afternoon when they were out walking together—one of the latter days of spring—that he finally made up his mind to adopt this line of conduct; and he approached the subject at once, though at first a little hesitatingly, and in a rather roundabout fashion.
‘What are you going to be, Harold, when you grow up,’ he asked—‘when you leave school and college, I mean?’
Brocklehurst looked somewhat surprised. ‘Be!’ he echoed. ‘Oh, I can’t tell you that. I haven’t even thought about it yet.... Besides I don’t want to be anything in particular. I shall be myself, I suppose—just what I have always been.’
‘But I mean what shall you do?’ Graham persisted. ‘You’ll do something, of course. What do you think about when you are all alone?’
Brocklehurst smiled. ‘Very often of you,’ he said lightly. ‘Oh, I dare say I shall manage to drift along somehow or other. That is what I do now, you know.’
‘Drift?’
‘Yes. Don’t you think it rather charming?’ He spoke in the half-lazy, half-ironic fashion Graham had now grown accustomed to, but which he had noticed to have a curiously irritating effect upon other people. It was indeed just one of the innocent causes of Brocklehurst’s unpopularity that he had thought of alluding to, especially since it, more than anything else, tended to make his masters dislike him.
‘I haven’t any very strong hold upon things,’ Brocklehurst amplified. ‘Everything seems nice enough until I actually do it; but immediately afterwards it begins to bore me a little. As soon as you’ve tried a thing, you know, it’s apt to become the least bit tiresome. That is why I shouldn’t care to tie myself down to anything in particular.’
‘But you must, for all that, follow some definite way of life,’ Graham answered, dissatisfied.