“You mean to let this fortune go to Magdalen College?”
“Unless I change my present intentions very completely.”
“Oh, Lord! This is green sickness, moonstruck madness; Hamlet’s monomania was nothing to it. Are you absolutely insensible to the fact that you would be able to print ten million copies of the Age to Come every week and distribute them gratis all over Great Britain every week?”
“Even that alluring prospect cannot tempt me. My acceptance of a fortune would be as anomalous as Lord Rosebery’s creation of peers. Miserable creatures that we are, we are only tolerably respectable so long as we are commonly consistent.”
“Oh, Lord save us! You can’t possibly be serious?”
“I speak in entire sincerity.”
“A very dangerous thing to do at any time. People have such a shocking habit of taking one at one’s word! Old Folliott’s very shrewd too, though he’s a Tory.”
“What is his shrewdness to me?”
“Well, if you retain him as your man of business it may be a great deal. It is usual to retain the testator’s solicitors when they are as eminent and irreproachable as Folliott and Hake.”
Bertram grows impatient.