“Where did you learn foils, Armstrong? For a year I’ve been trying to run you through the body, and I’ve never even yet scratched your arm.”
“I fenced a good deal at Oxford.”
“Ah! I wonder if I shall ever go to Oxford? This will cuts me out of that nicely.”
“Not at all. How?”
“Well, you can’t be my tutor here while I’m an undergraduate there, can you? I’d sooner give up Oxford than you, Armstrong.”
“Kind of you—wrong of you too, perhaps. But at twenty-one you’ll be your own master.”
“I may not be in the humour then. Besides, I shall have my hands full of work here then. It’s hard lines to have to kick my heels in idleness for two years, while I’ve so many plans in my head for improving the place, and to have to ask your leave to spend so much as a halfpenny.”
“It is rather tragic. It strikes me, however, that Cousin Edward will be the financial partner of our firm. I shall attend to the literary part of the business.”
“And poor mother has to umpire in all your squabbles. Upon my word, why couldn’t I have been treated like a man straight off, instead of being washed and dressed and fed with a spoon and wheeled in a perambulator by three respectable middle-aged persons, who all vote me a nuisance.”
“In the first place, Roger Ingleton, I am not yet middle-aged. In the second place, I do not vote you a nuisance. In the third place, if you stand there much longer like that, with your coat off, you will catch your death of cold, which would annoy me exceedingly.”