"Now, that will do!" cried Mrs. Ringrose. "That is my business, Spencer, and I will not allow you to speak so to my boy."
"Come, come, mother," Harry interrupted, "my uncle is quite right from his point of view. I admit I had qualms about going to Lord's myself. But I think I must have been meant to go--I know there was some meaning in my meeting Innes."
"If anything could surprise me in you, Henry," resumed Mr. Walthew, "it would be the Pagan sentiments which you have just pained me by uttering. May you live to pray forgiveness for your heresy, as also for your extravagance! But of the latter I will say no more, though I certainly think, Mary, that where my assistance has been invoked I have a right to speak my mind. The waste of money is, however, even less flagrant, in my opinion, than the waste of time. It is now several days, Henry, since I sent you a guide to shorthand. An energetic and conscientious fellow, as anxious as you say you are to work for his daily bread, could have mastered at least the rudiments in the time. Have you?"
"I told you he had not!" cried Mrs. Ringrose. "How can you expect it, when every day he has been seeking work in the City? And he comes in so tired!"
"Not too tired to go to Lord's Cricket-ground, however," was the not unjust rejoinder. "But perhaps his energy has found another outlet? Last time I was here he was going to write articles and poems for the magazines--so I understood. How many have you written, Henry?"
Harry scorned to point out that it was his mother's words which were being quoted against him, not his own; yet ever since his evening at Richmond he had been meaning to try his hand at something, and he felt guilty as he now confessed that he had not written a line.
"I was sure of it!" cried the clergyman. "You talk of getting employment, but you will not take the trouble to qualify yourself for the humblest post; you talk of writing, but you will not take the trouble even to write! Not that I suppose for a moment anything would come of it if you did! The magazines, Henry, do not open their columns to young fellows without literary training, any more than houses of business engage clerks without commercial education or knowledge. Yet it would be something even if you tried to write! It would be something if you wrote--as probably you would write--for the waste-paper basket and the dust-bin. But no, you seem to have no application, no energy, no sense of duty; and what more I can do for you I fail to see. I have written several letters on your account; I have risked offending several friends. Nothing has come of it, and nothing is likely to come of it until you put your own shoulder to the wheel. I have put mine. I have done _my_ best. My conscience is an easy one, at any rate."