“I will have no son of mine a loafer. You would live in London?”
“I should hope to practice there.”
“I’ll have no idlers and no cockneys in my family, Edward. Hepplestall’s! Hepplestall’s! and he sneers at it.”
“Oh, no, sir. Please. Not that. I feel it difficult to explain.”
“Don’t try.”
“I must. I think what I feel is that if we were speaking of land I as your eldest son should naturally come into possession. I should feel it, in the word you used, as a trust. But we are not speaking of land.”
Reuben gripped his chair-arms till his hands grew white and recovered a self-control that had nearly slipped away. The boy was ready to approve the law of primogeniture so long as he could be fastidious about his inheritance, so long as the inheritance was land. As it was not land, he wanted to run away. He deprecated steam. He dared, the jackanapes! “No,” said Reuben, “we are not speaking of land. We are speaking of Hepplestall’s.”
“If it were land,” Edward went on ingenuously, “however great the estate, you would not find me shirking my responsibility.”
“I see. And as it is not land? As it is this vastly greater thing than land?” Then suavity deserted him. “Boy,” he cried, “don’t you see what an enormous thing it is to be trustee of Hepplestall’s?”
“Oh,” said Edward, “it is big. But let me put a case.”