“Now don’t be clever with me, Ivor. What I want for you, don’t you see, is a Position in the world, some foothold or other. And a writer, even quite a nice writer, is nothing at all unless he has written something that every one has read, while a barrister is something even when no one has heard of him. He is something, I mean. I insist on your being something, Ivor.”
(Naturally one will be “something,” Ivor impatiently thought.)
“Of course,” said Aunt Moira, “you are very grown-up for your years. I don’t like it.”
“I suppose,” she said, “you’ve got ideas.”
Ivor’s eyes had been intent on his shoes, but he now looked up frankly.
“As a matter of fact,” he said pathetically, “I haven’t got one. But I’ve got a kind of feeling that I may have—you know, Aunt Moira?”
“I know,” said Aunt Moira, not sympathetically—though really very surprised at Ivor’s candour; it was pleasant to hear a young man who had just made an idiot of himself saying he had no ideas—a very good beginning, she thought, for a writer’s career.
It was decided, over tea, that he should stay on with Aunt Moira for a year or so, studying French and literature—and, added Ivor, sociology.
“Sociology,” snapped Aunt Moira, “is a game that self-educated labourers play with half-educated gentlemen. What you doubtless mean is politics.” Ivor let it go at that.
Later on, Ivor could take rooms of his own; and still later on, when he was of age, he could travel and do what he liked—provided, Aunt Moira insisted, he did something! She relied on him to be decent, she said. If she hated anything in this world, it was slackness, flabbiness, and shoddiness—μικροπρεπέια, the Little Man would have snapped, for he never missed a chance of remembering Aristotle against you. If he was going to write, well, he must write, but seriously.