Mrs. Burney did not consider that Fanny had made satisfactory progress with her work, and did not hesitate to express her opinion to this effect. But she was not imprudently unkind; for young Mr. Barlowe had just written to her, begging permission to pay his respects to Mrs. Burney and her daughter that evening, and she meant that Fanny should be in a good humour to entertain him.
Mrs. Burney had great hopes that the question of Fanny's future—a constant topic of conversation and consultation between her and her husband—might be settled by a series of visits of young Mr. Barlowe.
CHAPTER IX
YOUNG Mr. Barlowe took himself very seriously, and he had every right to do so; for a more serious young man was not to be found in business in London. He had been brought up to look upon everything in the world as having an intimate connection with business, and it had always been impressed upon him that business meant the increase of money, and that there was hardly anything in the world worth giving a thought to apart from the increase of money. It never occurred to any of his preceptors to suggest that the advantage of increasing one's money lay in the splendid possibilities of spending it. The art of making money forms the whole curriculum of a business man's education; he is supposed to require no instruction in the art of spending it. Thus it is that, by attending only to one side of the question, so many business men lead much less interesting lives than they might, if they had it in their power to place themselves under the guidance of a trustworthy professor of the Art of Spending. But no Chair of Spending has yet been provided at any University, nor is there any instructor on this important branch of business education at any of the City schools, hence it is that the sons of so many money-making men turn out spendthrifts. They have been taught only one side of the great money question, and that the less important side into the bargain. In making an honest endeavour to master the other side, usually on the death of a father or a bachelor uncle, both looked on as close-fisted curmudgeons, a good many young men find themselves in difficulties.
Young Mr. Barlowe, on being introduced to the Burney family, through the circumstance of Mrs. Burney's first husband having done business with Mr. Barlowe the elder, found himself in a strange atmosphere. He had never before imagined the existence of a household where music and plays and books were talked about as if these were the profitable topics of life. Previously he had lived in a house where the only profitable topic was thought to be the Profits. At his father's table in the Poultry the conversation never travelled beyond the Profits. The likelihood of a rise in the price of gold or silver sometimes induced the father to increase his stock of bullion without delay, and then if the price rose, he could conscientiously charge his customers for the lace at such a rate per ounce as gave him a clear five per cent, extra profit; and it was upon such possibilities that the conversation in the Poultry parlour invariably turned.
And here were these Burneys talking with extraordinary eagerness and vivacity upon such matters as the treatment by a singer named Gabrielli of one of the phrases in a song of Mr. Handel's, beginning: “Angels ever bright and fair”! For himself, young Mr. Barlowe thought that there was no need for so much repetition in any song. “Angels ever bright and fair, Take, oh take me to your care”—that was the whole thing, as it seemed to him; and when that request had been made once he thought it was quite enough; to repeat it half a dozen times was irritating and really tended to defeat its purpose. Only children in the nursery kept reiterating their requests. But he had heard Dr. Burney and his son-in-law, Esther's husband, discuss the Gabrielli's apparently unauthorized pause before the second violins suggested (as it appeared to the younger musician) a whisper of assent floating from the heaven; and all the members of the family except Fanny had taken sides in the controversy, as though a thing like that had any bearing upon the daily life of the City!
Thomas Barlowe was amazed at the childishness of the discussion, and he was particularly struck by the silence of Fanny on this occasion. She was silent, he was sure, because she agreed with him in thinking it ridiculous to waste words over a point that should be relegated to the nursery for settlement.
“They seem pleasant enough people in their way,” he told his mother after his first visit. “But they know nothing of what is going on in the world—the real world, of which the Poultry is the centre. It might be expected that the young man who is a naval officer and has seen the world would know something of the import of the question when I asked him what direction he thought gold would move in; but he only winked and replied, 'Not across my hawse, I dare swear,' and the others laughed as if he had said something humorous.”