'I can tell you what, Mitchell,' he said, 'I don't wonder at Cromwell, and I don't blame him. I believe it's better to go hungry on your own earnings than full fed at another man's expense. One can starve at home with a better grace than he can among strangers. That's my mind. It mayn't be his.'
'It's mine, though,' said Paul. 'If I had the money—if I had a hundred dollars, I should insist on his taking them. I wish my mother had put me to a trade: it's all nonsense, this slaving for the sake of position—what you call it.'
'Don't talk so,' said Scheffer. 'If Harry Cromwell wants anything of me, I should be ashamed of him if he wouldn't ask it. As to wishing that you had a trade, if there's a mechanical turn in you, you'll twist into it yet. But I don't believe there is. Go on as you have begun. It will all come out right.'
Paul scanned the fine face of the speaker in a spirit of inquiry unguessed of August. He was thinking of Josephine, and of her words. Then he said, 'So you always say. But I can't see it. If I could, then I'd be a philosopher like you. Do you mean I should speak to Harry?'
Scheffer hesitated.
'I see him every day,' said he. 'Sometimes he comes in here. Don't you think he would be better pleased if it should happen of itself, you know—not as if we had talked over his affairs. He is such a proud fellow.'
Paul readily acceded to this plan. He told Josephine what he had done, and she worked on with a lighter heart. She was thinking of Scheffer. How slowly he had grown up into her sight again! Man and woman, if they looked at each other now, must it be across a great gulf? What had education done for her! Could she thank the teaching that had brought her to see in her womanhood something beyond the reach of a man like Scheffer? Could she thank the culture that gave her a position for which nature and habits like his were all unfit? This maturity seemed unnatural to the heart of that remembered childhood, which, in its brave, loving generosity, could trust a boy to any work or station, feeling that in the workman would be securely lodged himself.
Even more than she suspected, Josephine had been moved by the secret Paul had confided to her—of Scheffer's new ambition. No new ambition was it, she could testify. In the fulness of time the bud had come to flower, and on the same stem fair fruits were ripening.
And now, it was he who would relieve her of the anxiety she felt on Cromwell's behalf. She kept these things in her heart.