Edward shook his head. “It couldn’t be done twice. I got it by a lucky fluke—a friend of my father’s, you know. But they’re deuced stiff now,” he answered. “You have to do exams and things. An old johnnie asks you what bounds Peru on the northeast, and if you can’t remember just at the minute, why, you get chucked. Out you go, d’ye see?”
“What is your idea, then? What would you like to do?”
Captain Edward knitted his scanty, pale brows over this question, and regarded the prospect through the window in frowning perplexity. “Oh, almost anything,” he remarked at last, vacuously.
Christian permitted himself the comment of a smiling sniff. “Think it over,” he said, and directed his glance at the younger brother. “You’re in Parliament,” he observed, with a slight difference in tone. “I’m not sure that I quite understand-What is it that attracts you in a—in a Parliamentary career?”
Augustine lifted his pale, scanty brows in surprise. The right kind of answer did not come readily to him. “Well,” he began with hesitation—“there was that seat in Cheshire where we still had a good bit of land—and Julius didn’t object—and I had an idea it would help me in the City.” He recovered confidence as he went on. “But it is pretty well played out now, I came in too late. The Kaffir boom spoiled the whole show. Five years ago an M P. could pick and choose; I knew fellows who were on twenty boards at a time, and big blocks of stock were flying about them like—like hailstones. But you can’t do that now. M. P.s are as cheap as dirt; they won’t have ’em at any price. A fellow hardly makes his cab-fares in the City nowadays. And even if you get the very best inside tips, brokers have got so fearfully nasty about your margins being covered——”
“Oh, well,” interposed Christian, “it isn’t necessary that we should go into all that. I do not like to hear about the City. If you get money for yourself there, you have taken it away from somebody else. I would rather that people of our name kept away from such things.”
“If you come to that, everybody’s money is taken from somebody else,” said Edward, unexpectedly entering the conversation. His brother checked him with a monitory hand on his arm. “No, you don’t understand,” Augustine warned him. “I quite see what the Duke means.”
“If you see what I mean,” returned Christian, quietly, “perhaps you will follow the rest that I have to say; Do you care very much about remaining in Parliament?” Augustine’s face reflected an eager mental effort to get at his august interlocutor’s meaning. “Well—that’s so hard to say,” he began, anxiously. “There are points about it, of course—but then—when you look at it in another way, why of course——”
“My idea is this,” Christian interposed once more. “I hope you won’t mind my saying it—but there seems to me something rather ridiculous about your being in the House. Parliament ought not to be treated as a joke, or a convenience. It is a place for men who will work hard in the service of the country, and who have the tastes and the information and the judgment and the patriotic devotion to make their work of value to their country. I dare say that there are members who do not entirely measure up to this standard, but after all there is a standard, and I do not like to be a party to lowering it. England has claims upon us Torrs; it deserves something better at our hands than that. So I think I would like you to consider the idea of resigning your seat—or at least, dropping out at the end of this Parliament. Or no—that would be waiting too long. You would better think of retiring now.”
“Do you mean that I am to stand for the seat, instead?” asked Edward, looking up with awakened interest.