“Edward!” Dorothy broke silence there.
“Oh!” said Reuben, “this is natural. Our limb of the law has ambitions. Already he is fancying himself a judge—my judge.”
“I apologize, sir,” said Edward. “I acknowledge, I have never doubted, that you are both manufacturer and gentleman. But I cannot hope to repeat that miracle myself.”
“You can try.”
“I have the law very obstinately in my mind, sir. I could, as you say, try to become a manufacturer. One can try to do anything, even things that are contrary to one’s inclinations and beyond one’s strength.”
“I will lend you strength.”
“You could do that and I am the last to deny you have abundance of strength. But I believe in spite of your aid that I should fail, and the failure would not be a single but a double one. After failing here as manufacturer, I could hardly hope to succeed elsewhere as a barrister. I should have wasted my most valuable years in demonstrating to you what I know for myself without any necessity of trial, that I am unfitted for trade.”
“You believe yourself above it. That is the truth, Edward.”
It was the truth. Reuben had stooped and Edward did not intend to perpetuate the stoop. Edward was a wronged man cheated of his due, robbed by the unintelligible apostasy of his father of his birthright of land ownership and if the attitude and the language with which he now confronted Reuben were unfilially independent, they were, at least, reticent and considerate expressions of what he actually thought. Reuben imagined him youthfully extravagant: he was, on the contrary, a model of self-restraint, he was a dam unbreakable, withstanding an urgent flood. The indictment he could fling at his father! The resentments he could voice! And, instead, he was doing no more than refusing to go into a disreputable factory. Above it? He should think he was above it.
“I used the word ‘unfitted,’” he said. “Shall we let that stand?”