"No occasion whatever. A bedroom can be very cosy when the lamp's lighted and there's a bottle of wine on the table, can't it, Cynthia?"
"She won't have any bottles of wine. What are you thinking of?" said Mrs. Walford. "Not but what she could afford wine," she added hastily; "but it doesn't agree with her; it never did! I suppose you know that Cæsar is still in Germany? He has settled there. If there are moments when I feel out of it in spite of the company we see at Strawberry Hill, it's when I read of the life that boy leads in Berlin. He is in a brilliant circle—most brilliant!"
"Cynthia told me he had a first-rate thing."
"Capital thing!" affirmed Sam briskly. "I tell you, he's going to the top of the tree. When he's my age Cæsar will be a big figure in Europe."
Kent thought he was a fair size already, but replied briefly that he had been "very fortunate."
"Ability, my lad! He's got the brains! Do you know, Louisa, it was damn foolishness of us ever to persuade that boy to go on the stage? He was meant for what he is—we'd no right to divert his natural bent. He's in the proper groove because his tendency was too strong for us. But we were wrong—I say we did very wrong! By George! he might never have made more than a couple of hundred a week among greasy opera-singers all his life. What a thing!" By dint of many midnight conferences with Louisa, he had almost succeeded in believing that he meant part of what he said.
"Are his prospects so very wonderful, then?" asked Cynthia, surprised. "What is it he is doing? It is only a sort of clerkship, isn't it?"
"A clerkship?" shrieked her mother. "How can you talk such ridic'lous nonsense? A clerkship? Absurd! He's McCullough's right hand—quite his right hand! McCullough says he would be worth twice as much as he is to-day if he had met Cæsar five years ago. He told your papa so last week—didn't he, Sam?"
"He did," said the jobber. But there was less conviction in his tone. This was new, and he hadn't taught himself to try to credit it yet.
"He told your papa that Cæsar's power of—er—of gripping a subject was immense; he had never met anything like it. He consults him in everything; he doesn't take a step without asking Cæsar's opinion first; I don't suppose a young man ever had such an extraordinary position before. Clerkship? Ho, you don't know what you're talking about!"