“You almost frighten me, Charlie. You were never meant for honours or a high degree, were you? Papa said you need not go in for honours, it would lose time; and you thought so, too.”
“I have changed my mind,” said Charlie, nervously. “I thought, like other asses, that in diplomacy you don’t want much; but now I think differently. How are you to understand how to conduct national affairs and all that, and reconcile conflicting claims, and so forth, and settle the real business of the world——”
“But Charlie, I thought it was languages, and great politeness, and—and even dancing, and that sort of thing, that was wanted in an attaché——”
“Attachés,” said the young man, with a gravity which, serious as she also was, almost made Bee laugh, “are the material out of which ambassadors are made. Of course, it takes time——”
Here Bee burst, without meaning it, into a nervous laugh.
“You are so dreadfully serious about it,” she cried.
“And what should a man be serious about, if not that?” the young man replied.
Here for the moment, in great impatience on his part, and in the call of some little household necessity on hers, the conversation closed; but it was resumed as soon as the brother and sister were together again. The big boys were still at school, the little ones engaged with their lessons, and baby walking up and down in his nurse’s arms, did not interrupt the talk which went on between the elders of the family. And there is nothing with which it is so easy to indoctrinate a girl than enthusiasm about an ideal, whatever that may be, or sympathy in a lofty view of duty such as this, which had dawned, it seemed, upon her brother. Bee took fire, as was so natural. She said to herself, that in the utter downfall of her own life, it would be a fine thing to be able to further his, and kept to the idea of Charlie as ambassador, settling all sorts of difficulties and deciding the fortunes of the world for war or for peace, as easily as if the question had been one of leading a cotillion. How splendid it would be! She thought of herself as an old lady, white-haired, in a cap and shawl—for, in an imagination of twenty, there are few gradations between youth and that pathetic, yet satisfactory ultimate period—seated in a particular corner of a magnificent room at the Embassy, looking on at her brother’s triumph. These sort of reflected successes were the only ones she thought that would ever come to Bee.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
“Charlie wishes to go up to Oxford to read. Why does he wish to go up to Oxford to read? And what reading is it necessary to do there?”