“Fearless, and good fun,” continued Ailie. “Oh, dear Will! what a merry soul he was. Well, the child cannot be a fool if he's like his father. American independence, though he has it in—in—in clods, won't do him any harm at all. I love Americans—do you hear that, Bell Dyce?—because they beat that stupid old King George, and have been brave in the forest and wise on the prairie, and feared no face of man, and laughed at dynasties. I love them because they gave me Emerson, and Whitman, and Thoreau, and because one of them married my brother William, and was the mother of his child.”
Dan Dyce nodded; he never quizzed his sister Ailie when it was her heart that spoke and her eyes were sparkling.
“The first thing you should learn him,” said Miss Dyce, “is 'God Save the Queen.' It's a splendid song altogether; I'm glad I'm of a kingdom every time I hear it at a meeting, for it's all that's left of the olden notions the Dyces died young or lost their money for. You'll learn him that, Ailie, or I'll be very vexed with you. I'll put flesh on his bones with my cooking if you put the gentleman in him.”
It was Bell's idea that a gentleman talked a very fine English accent like Ailie, and carried himself stately like Ailie, and had wise and witty talk for rich or poor like Ailie.
“I'm not so sure about the university,” she went on. “Such stirks come out of it sometimes; look at poor Maclean, the minister! They tell me he could speak Hebrew if he got anybody to speak it back slow to him, but just imagine the way he puts on his clothes! And his wife manages him not so bad in broad Scotch. I think we could do nothing better than make the boy a lawyer; it's a trade looked up to, and there's money in it, though I never could see the need of law myself if folk would only be agreeable. He could go into Dan's office whenever he is old enough.”
“A lawyer!” cried her brother. “You have first of all to see that he's not an ass.”
“And what odds would that make to a lawyer?” said Bell, quickly, snapping her eyes at the brother she honestly thought the wisest man in Scotland.
“Bell,” said he, “as I said before, you're a haivering body—nothing else, though I'll grant you bake no' a bad scone. And as for you, Ailie, you're beginning, like most women, at the wrong end. The first thing to do with your nephew is to teach him to be happy, for it's a habit that has to be acquired early, like the taste for pease-brose.”
“You began gey early yourself,” said Bell. “Mother used to say that she was aye tickling your feet till you laughed when you were a baby. I sometimes think that she did not stop it soon enough.”
“If I had to educate myself again, and had not a living to make, I would leave out a good many things the old dominie thought needful. What was yon awful thing again?—mensuration. To sleep well and eat anything, fear the face of nobody in bashfulness, to like dancing, and be able to sing a good bass or tenor—that's no bad beginning in the art of life. There's a fellow Brodie yonder in the kirk choir, who seems to me happier than a king when he's getting in a fine boom-boom of bass to the tune Devizes; he puts me all out at my devotions on a Lord's day with envy of his accomplishment.”