“What’s that?” asked Sheila, laughing.
“Well, I’m not quite sure if I know; but it’s not a thing he’d like to be called. What the boys mean about him is that he’s half ashamed of his own family, and the way in which his father has made his money, and that’s always awfully snobbish. Why, to my thinking, the other brother, North, is much more a true gentleman. I despise people who are ashamed of their origin. It is nice to be a landed proprietor and a country gentleman, of course; but there’s no disgrace in honest trade. Why, three of our boys have had to go into business in some of its forms; but do you think they’d be ashamed of it, or that we should be ashamed of them? I should despise myself for ever if I were!”
“Yes, I suppose he is rather ashamed of the works,” said Sheila slowly. “He never would have anything to do with them. I don’t quite know what he does want for himself. Sometimes he talks about the Bar, and sometimes the Church, and sometimes he thinks he’ll take up literature. I suppose he’s clever.”
“The boys don’t think so; he only got a pass, you know. And I don’t think I like men to take to the Church just for a profession. I’ve got a brother a clergyman; but I know how he felt about it before he took Orders. He used sometimes to talk to me. He felt that he had been called; that is a very different thing from choosing for yourself, and shilly-shallying as Cyril is doing.”
Sheila began to see that May, although not much older than herself, thought things out more deeply than she had ever done.
“The boys have always talked to me, you know,” she said, “and Arnold in particular. He is the clergyman, you know. That made one think. It would be nicer to believe in everybody; but perhaps it’s better sometimes to see below the surface. Sometimes I wish almost that something would happen just to try the metal we and our friends are made of. In olden times, when there were wars and dangers, it must have been so much easier to know what they were like; but nothing ever does happen in the nineteenth century—not in that sort of way.”
Nevertheless, a good deal was happening in other ways, and the excitement increased as the time for the bazaar arrived.
The town hall was a spacious building, and it was decorated in an effective fashion with festoons of greenery and paper and tinsel flowers. Some people called it trumpery stuff; but it looked well, and was cheap, and to keep down expenses was one of the chief aims of the assistants.
The bazaar was held in the great hall; but there were two smaller rooms, off-shoots from this, reached by short wide flights of steps, and in these rooms the supplementary entertainments were to be held.
One was a museum of curiosities and beautiful things lent, for which extra admission was charged; the other was given over to entertainments. On the first day there was to be a phonograph and some experiments with electrical apparatus, in which Oscar was to assist. On the second the concert, and on the third some tableaux.