“It’s nothing else,” said the bishop. “And we can’t afford to have well-bred men shirking their job.”
“Sometimes I fear Edmund will never be very different. He’s a bohemian—a marine bohemian, if such a thing is possible. But there have always been people like him in our family.”
“Want of opportunity,” the bishop replied with emphasis. “Such men are simply victims of our social system. There is always a job for them, the biggest kind of job. When they find it or make it, they become our greatest men. Very often they miss it through the hide-bound stupidity of our organisation. However, his chance will come, it is sure to come, if he keeps himself fit and ready for it. But I don’t like this commercialism.”
“He won’t take my money, so he has to make it pay.”
“Yes, of course. I hope he’ll get rich at once and be done with it—or else fail altogether.”
“You don’t like the idea of the shop?”
“Oh, that’s only a detail. The whole thing appears to be petty trade.”
“He seems to leave that almost all to his partner.”
“Well, I don’t think he should. We don’t know this Captain Welfare. But anyhow, in spite of all the modern tendency, shop-keeping is not for gentlemen. It’s bad for them. The worst fate that can befall a gentleman is to become ‘déclassé’.”
“I don’t see what else we can do with him at present,” I protested.