“I thought so,” said Mr Hexton, chuckling. “You must not stop at home, Phil. She’ll want you to have camomile tea three times a week.”
“You may joke as much as you like, Hexton,” said his wife, bridling, “but no one shall ever say that I put anybody into a damp bed; and as for the camomile tea, many a time has it given you health when you have been ailing.”
“Why, you don’t think I ever took any of the stuff you left out for me, do you?”
“Of course, dear.”
“Never took a glass of it,” said Old Hexton, chuckling. “Threw it all out of the window.”
“Then it was a great shame,” said Mrs Hexton angrily, “and a very bad example to set to your son.”
“Never mind, Phil; don’t you take it,” chuckled Mr Hexton. Then becoming serious he went on: “Well, there’s no hurry, my boy; only now that you are back from Germany, and can talk High Dutch and Low Dutch, and French, and all the rest of it, why it is getting time to settle what you are to do. I could allow you so much a year, and let you be a gentleman, with nothing to do, if I liked; but I don’t hold with a young fellow going through life and being of no use—only a tailor’s dummy to wear fine clothes.”
“Oh no, father; I mean to take to a business life,” said Philip Hexton quickly.
“Of course, my lad; and you’ll do well in it. I began life in a pair of ragged breeches that didn’t fit me, shoving the corves of coal in a mine; and now,” he exclaimed proudly, “I’m partner as well as manager in our pit. So what I say is, if I could do what I have done, beginning life in a pair of ragged breeches that didn’t fit me, why, what can my boy do, as has had a first-class education, and can have money to back him?”
“My dear James,” said Mrs Hexton, “I do wish you would not be so fond of talking about those—those—”