“A very bad banker,” he replied ruefully. “To tell the truth, Miss Griffin, I hate banking. Pounds, shillings, and pence—and this!” He pointed to the country about them, the stream, the sylvan path they were treading, the wood beside them, with its depths gilded here and there by a ray of the sun. “A desk and a ledger—and this! Oh, I hate them! I would like to live out of doors. I want”—in a burst of candor—“to live my own life! To be able to follow my own bent and make the most of myself.”
“Perhaps,” she said with naïveté, “you would like to be a country gentleman?” And indeed the lot of a country gentleman in that day was an enviable one.
“Oh no,” he said, his tone deprecating the idea. He did not aspire to that.
“But what, then?” She did not understand. “Have you no ambition?”
“I’d like to be—a farmer, if I had my way.”
That surprised as well as dashed her. She thought of her father’s tenants and her face fell. “Oh, but,” she said, “a farmer? Why?” He was not like any farmer she had ever seen.
But he would not be dashed. “To make two blades of grass grow where one grew before,” he answered stoutly, though he knew that he had sunk in her eyes. “Just that; but after all isn’t that worth doing? Isn’t that better than burying your head in a ledger and counting other folk’s money while the sun shines out of doors, and the rain falls sweetly, and the earth smells fresh and pure? Besides, it is all I am good for, Miss Griffin. I do think I understand a bit about that. I’ve read books about it and I’ve kept my eyes open, and—and what one likes one does well, you know.”
“But farmers——”
“Oh, I know,” sorrowfully, “it must seem a very low thing to you.”
“Farmers don’t look at snowdrops, Mr. Ovington,” with a gleam of fun in her eyes.