He had roused a little under the influence of this suggestion when his uncle returned. Mr. Joscelyn had a compunction in his mind which made him very conciliatory to Harry. To give him what he seemed to want, to subtract so much, even if not very much, from his own possessions in order to give to Harry, was an idea which he would not contemplate. If Harry waited long enough he would get it; but in the meantime, a demand upon him was like a warning that he had lived long enough, and that his money was wanted for a new generation, which was as intolerable to Uncle Henry as young Harry’s troubles were to him. He would not take upon himself the burden of setting his grand-nephew up in life, but at the same time he felt it was a hardship that the young fellow should not have some one to set him up in life, and was conciliatory and soothing by a kind of generous instinct, an instinct not generous enough to go further. He came in in a mood which was much more agreeable to Harry than that in which he had gone out, and which raised Mrs. Eadie’s hopes high, who knew that her master did not often come back in this way, or show himself so amiable. Mr. Joscelyn told Harry all the story of the waste-paper, and gave him great insight into the workings of the Club.
“If you are faithful to your native county, as I have been, I daresay you will end by being a member of it,” he said.
“It is not very likely, Sir,” said Harry. “I don’t care if I were never to see the old place again.”
“That is nonsense,” said his uncle, promptly. “That’s a question of age entirely. At your time of life you think that all that is to be desired is to be in the world, and you don’t understand that the world is not in one place as much as another, not the grand world in London, or the business world in Liverpool, but is just your world wherever you may happen to be.”
This was above Harry, who gaped slightly, and opened his eyes with curiosity and wonder.
“You will scarcely say that this is the world like London,” he said, with that smile of youthful comment upon the mysterious obtuseness of their elders which is general to every new generation.
“But this is just what I do say, my boy; you have your little world round about you, and neither is it bigger in the noise of a big place, nor smaller in the quiet of a little one. We are capable just of so much, and that we get wherever we are.”