“Not for such an object as you want them to serve.”
“I suppose, when you come to practise at the bar, you’ll only defend innocence and protect virtue, eh? You’ll, of course, never take the brief of a knave, or try to get a villain off. With your principles, to do so would be the basest of all crimes.”
“I hope I’ll never do that deliberately which my conscience tells me I ought not to do.”
“All right. Conscience is always in one’s own keeping--a guest in the house, who is far too well bred to be disagreeable to the family. Oh, you arch hypocrite! how much worse you are than a reprobate like myself!”
“I mean that, without conceding the point, it’s a thesis I’ll not argue.”
“You ought to have been a Jesuit, Loyd. You’d have been a grand fellow in a long black soutane, with little buttons down to the feet, and a skull-cap on your head. I think I see some poor devil coming to you about a ‘cas de conscience,’ and going away sorely puzzled with your reply to him.”
“Don’t come to me with one of yours, Calvert, that’s all,” said Loyd, laughing, as he hurried off.
Like many men who have a strong spirit of banter in them, Calvert was vexed and mortified when his sarcasm did not wound. “If the stag will not run, there can be no pursuit,” and so was it that he now felt angry with Loyd, angry with himself. “I suppose these are the sort of fellows who get on in life. The world likes their quiet subserviency, and their sleek submissiveness. As for me, and the like of me, we are ‘not placed.’ Now for a line to my Cousin Sophy, to know who is the ‘Grainger’ who says she is so well acquainted with us all. Poor Sophy, it was a love affair once between us, and then it came to a quarrel, and out of that we fell into the deeper bitterness of what is called ‘a friendship.’ We never really hated each other till we came to that!”
“Dearest, best of friends,” he began, “in my broken health, fortunes, and spirits, I came to this place a few weeks ago, and made, by chance, the acquaintance of an atrocious old woman called Grainger--Miss or Mrs., I forget which--who is she, and why does she know _us_, and call us the ‘dear Calverts,’ and your house ‘sweet old Rocksley?’ I fancy she must be a begging-letter impostor, and has a design--it will be a very abortive one--upon my spare five-pound notes. Tell me all you know of her, and if you can add a word about her nieces twain--one pretty, the other prettier--do so.