‘I wish I only knew what it was for,’ cried Jim. ‘You know I haven’t been lucky, Osborne. I got into a scrape, don’t you know. I suppose everybody knows: though we think at the Rectory that if we make-believe strong enough nobody need know.’
‘A great many men get into scrapes,’ said the curate oracularly.
‘Don’t they, now?’ cried Jim, with eagerness; ‘that’s what my people won’t see.’
‘The only thing is to get out of them as fast as possible,’ added Mr. Osborne.
‘Ah,’ said Jim, a little crestfallen. He went on after a pause: ‘If you knew what your governor meant, don’t you know. He wants me to read, and yet he says I’m to go out to a ranche or into an office in the city. Why doesn’t he make up his mind? And what good will Greek do me on a ranche? Morris the vet. could teach me what would be more use for that than all the Sophocles in the world.’
‘But then you see,’ said the curate, ‘Morris is not just the kind of tutor for a gentleman.’
‘Oh,’ said Jim again. His pride was of the kind that could not bear to desert his friends, however undesirable. ‘He’s a decent fellow enough.’
‘In his own sphere—I suppose so,’ said Osborne; ‘and clever, they tell me, in his way; but not our kind.’ He added: ‘I believe, from what I’ve heard, if you are going to a ranche, the best way of learning is just—to go.’
‘If any one he minds would only tell my father that,’ said Jim, gratified by the pronoun, and that Osborne had said ‘our’ instead of ‘your.’ He was aware that Osborne’s ‘kind’ was different from his own, and that his kind would not have been, perhaps, very desirable for one of the curate’s cloth. Thank God, there was no question of Jim going into the Church, though it had been his mother’s desire. ‘That’s the chief thing I complain of,’ he said; ‘let them tell me straight out what I’m to do. Whether it’s one thing or the other I don’t mind. If it’s to be Oxford over again, well, then the Greek’s good for something; but if it’s the ranche——’
‘That is reasonable,’ said the curate, ‘and if you put it to the Rector like that, surely——’