Jock paused and thought.
“Why shouldn’t I be rich too?” he remarked. It was not said as a question; it was an observation. The fact did not trouble him, but en passant he noticed it as a thing which might perhaps want explaining. It was not of half so much importance, however, as the next thing that came into his head.
“I say, Lucy, do you think that boy on the pony has to go to school? What do you think he can be learning at school? I should like to go there too.”
“When you go, it shall be to a much nicer place,” she said, with energy. “There is one thing I should like to be rich for, and that is for you, little Jock. You don’t know anything at all yet. You ought to be learning Greek and Latin, and mathematics, and a great many other things. It makes me quite unhappy when I think of it. I go to school, but it does not matter for me; and you are living all your time, not learning anything, reading nonsense on the hearth-rug. I could cry when I think of it,” Lucy said. She said it very quietly, but this was vehemence in her.
Jock looked up at her with wondering eyes; for his own part he had no enthusiasm for study, nor, except for the pleasure of being with the circus boy, whom he vaguely apprehended as caracoling about the very vague place which his imagination conceived of as “School,” on his pretty pony, had he any desire to be sent there; but it did not occur to him to enter into any controversy on the subject.
“Are you going up-town, Lucy?” he asked; “have you got to go to shops again? I wish you would buy all your ribbons at one time, and not be always, always buying more. Aunty Ford when she goes out goes to shops too, and you have to stand and stare about, and there’s nothing to look at, and nothing to do.”
“What would you like to do, Jock?”
“Oh, I don’t know—nothing,” said the boy; “if I had a pony I’d get on its back and ride off a hundred miles before I stopped.”
“The horse couldn’t go a hundred miles, nor you either, dear.”
“Oh, yes, I could, or ten at least, and if I met any one on the road I’d run races with him; and I’d call the horse Black Bess, or else Rozinante, or else Chiron; but Chiron wasn’t only a horse, you know, he was a horseman.”