“I am waiting for you to tell me.”
“Well, you are to be articled to Reginald.”
“O Lord!” groaned Jeremy, “I don’t like that at all.”
“Be quiet till I have told you. You are to be articled to Reginald, and he is to pay you an allowance of a hundred a year while you are articled, so that if you don’t like it you needn’t live here.”
“But I don’t like the business, Doll; I hate it; it is a beastly business; it’s a devil’s business.”
“I should like to know what right you have to talk like that, Mr. Knowall! Let me tell you that many better men than you are content to earn their living by lawyer’s work. I suppose that a man can be honest as a lawyer as well as in any other trade.”
Jeremy shook his head doubtfully. “It’s blood-sucking,” he said energetically.
“Then you must suck blood,” she answered, with decision. “Look here, Jeremy, don’t be pig-headed and upset all my plans. If you fall out with Reginald over this, he won’t do anything else for you. He doesn’t like you, you know, and would be only too glad to pick a quarrel with you if he could do it with a clear conscience, and then where would you be, I should like to know?”
Jeremy was unable to form an opinion as to where he would be, so she went on:
“You must take to it for the present, at any rate. And then there is another thing to think of. Ernest is to go to the bar, and unless you become a lawyer, if anything happened to Reginald, there will be nobody to give him a start, and I’m told that is everything at the bar.”