was scrutinized with an eye that was full of anxious care. "Now, Cissy, what do you think of that? She knows a glass of good wine when she gets it, as well as you do, Harry; in spite of her contempt for the duck."
As they sipped the old port they sat round the dining-room fire, and Harry Clavering was forced to own to himself that he had never been more comfortable.
"Ah," said Burton, stretching out his slippered feet, "why can't it all be after-dinner, instead of that weary room at the Adelphi?"
"And all old port?" said Jones.
"Yes, and all old port. You are not such an ass as to suppose that a man in suggesting to himself a continuance of pleasure suggests to himself also the evils which are supposed to accompany such pleasure. If I took much of the stuff I should get cross and sick, and make a beast of myself; but then what a pity it is that it should be so."
"You wouldn't like much of it, I think," said his wife.
"That is it," said he. "We are driven to work because work never palls on us, whereas pleasure always does. What a wonderful scheme it is when one looks at it all. No man can follow pleasure long continually. When a man strives to do so, he turns his pleasure at once into business, and works at that. Come, Harry, we mustn't have another bottle, as Jones would go to sleep among the type." Then they all went upstairs together. Harry, before he went away, was taken again up into the nursery, and there kissed the two little girls in their cots. When he was outside the nursery door, on the top of the stairs, Mrs. Burton took him by the hand. "You'll come to us often," said she, "and make yourself at home here, will you not?" Harry could not but say that he would. Indeed he did so without hesitation, almost with eagerness, for he had liked her and had liked her house. "We think of you, you know," she continued, "quite as one of ourselves. How could it be otherwise when Flo is the dearest to us of all beyond our own?"
"It makes me so happy to hear you say so," said he.
"Then come here and talk about her. I want Theodore to feel that you are his brother; it will be so important to you in the business that it should be so." After that he went away, and as he walked back along Piccadilly, and then up through the regions of St. Giles to his home in Bloomsbury Square, he satisfied himself that the life of Onslow Crescent was a better manner of life than that which was likely to prevail in Bolton Street.
When he was gone his character was of course discussed between the husband and wife in Onslow Crescent. "What do you think of him?" said the husband.
"I like him so much! He is so much nicer than you told me—so much pleasanter and easier; and I have no doubt he is as clever, though I don't think he shows that at once."
"He is clever enough; there's no doubt about that."
"And did you not think he was pleasant?"
"Yes; he was pleasant here. He is one of those men who get on best with women. You'll make much more of him for awhile than I shall. He'll gossip with you and sit idling with you for the hour together, if you'll let him. There's nothing wrong about him, and he'd like nothing better than that."
"You don't believe that he's idle by disposition? Think of all that he has done already."
"That's just what is most against him. He might do very well with us if he had not got that confounded fellowship; but having got that, he thinks the hard work of life is pretty well over with him."
"I don't suppose he can be so foolish as that, Theodore."
"I know well what such men are, and I know the evil that is done to them by the cramming they endure. They learn many names of things—high-sounding names, and they come to understand a great deal about words. It is a knowledge that requires no experience and very little real thought. But it demands much memory; and when they have loaded themselves in this way, they think that they are instructed in all things. After all, what can they do that is of real use to mankind? What can they create?"
"I suppose they are of use."
"I don't know it. A man will tell you, or pretend to tell you—for the chances are ten to one that he is wrong—what sort of lingo was spoken in some particular island or province six hundred years before Christ. What good will that do any one, even if he were right? And then see the effect upon the men themselves! At four-and-twenty a young fellow has achieved some wonderful success, and calls himself by some outlandish and conceited name—a double first, or something of the kind. Then he thinks he has completed everything, and is too vain to learn anything afterwards. The truth is, that at twenty-four no man has done more than acquire the rudiments of his education. The system is bad from beginning to end. All that competition makes false and imperfect growth. Come, I'll go to bed."
What would Harry have said if he had heard all this from the man who dusted his boots with his handkerchief?
CHAPTER IX.
TOO PRUDENT BY HALF.
Florence Burton thought herself the happiest girl in the world. There was nothing wanting to the perfection of her bliss. She could perceive, though she never allowed her mind to dwell upon the fact, that her lover was superior in many respects to the men whom her sisters had married. He was better educated, better looking, in fact more fully a gentleman at all points than either Scarness or any of the others. She liked her sisters' husbands very well, and in former days, before Harry Clavering had come to Stratton, she had never taught herself to think that she, if she married, would want anything different from that which Providence had given to them. She had never thrown up her head, or even thrown up her nose, and told herself that she would demand something better than that. But not the less was she alive to the knowledge that something better had come in her way, and that that something better was now her own. She was very proud of her lover, and, no doubt, in some gently feminine way showed that she was so as she made her way about among her friends at Stratton. Any idea that she herself was better educated, better looking, or more clever than her elder sisters, and that, therefore, she was deserving of a higher order of husband, had never entered her mind. The Burtons in London—Theodore Burton and his wife—who knew her well, and who, of all the family, were best able to appreciate her worth, had long been of opinion that she deserved some specially favoured lot in life. The question with them would be, whether Harry Clavering was good enough for her.
Everybody at Stratton knew that she was engaged, and when they wished her joy she made no coy denials. Her sisters had all been engaged in the same way, and their marriages had gone off in regular sequence to their engagements. There had never been any secret with them about their affairs. On this matter the practice is very various among different people. There are families who think it almost indelicate to talk about marriage as a thing actually in prospect for any of their own community. An ordinary acquaintance would be considered to be impertinent in even hinting at such a thing, although the thing were an established fact. The engaged young ladies only whisper the news through the very depths of their pink note-paper, and are supposed to blush as they communicate the tidings by their pens, even in the retirement of their own rooms. But there are other families in which there is no vestige of such mystery, in which an engaged couple are spoken of together as openly as though they were already bound in some sort of public partnership. In these families the young ladies talk openly of their lovers, and generally prefer that subject of conversation to any other. Such a family—so little mysterious—so open in their arrangements, was that of the Burtons at Stratton. The reserve in the reserved families is usually atoned for by the magnificence
