"Somehow or other, my mother did eventually get things straight. There wasn't much to bring up a future Prime Minister on, and besides, there was my brother. He took more after my father than I did. I was mother's boy, but he was a dark daring little devil without much respect for either of us. I don't know quite how it began, but between us there grew a feeling that can't be called brotherly love. Perhaps he realized that, according to my mother's ideas of founding a family, I was to be first and he was to be--nowhere. As it happened this was not just. He was clever from the very first. I was to be an engineer, and he was to do--well, anything that came along. But he had the talent for engineering; I hadn't. I liked it, same as any boy does, but while I couldn't do a simple division sum without making a mess of it, he could do it in his head, and standing on his head for that matter. Whatever he tried, that he could do, whereas my range has always been quiet and limited. I liked reading. He never seemed to be in the house long enough to read anything, but he knew more than I did. He does now."
"That's more than I can say. I'll get to that presently. What I want you to understand is the feeling we brothers had for each other. He didn't detest me, you know. He didn't take the trouble to do that. He simply laughed at me. He made friends with board-school boys and even errand-boys. One day my mother saw him out in the baker's cart driving it round the neighbourhood. It was a sore humiliation for her, I'm afraid. He didn't care. There were girls, too, even when he was only ten or eleven. Humph!
"All this time I was growing up in this sort of life, the life of the professional classes. When I left school, at seventeen, neither my mother nor I had much idea of the way a young gentleman became an engineer. She had no relatives in England, my father's brothers were either at sea or dead, and my father's business friends dropped away when he died, a way business friends have, I've noticed since. We were aliens still as far as real friends went. And then one day we saw an interview in a paper called the _Young Pilgrim_, one of those mushy papers for young people that do a lot of harm, in my opinion. It was an interview with Sir Gregory Gotch, the great engineer. My mother, who had a good deal of practical enterprise, decided to write to him and ask him. I've often wondered what he thought of that letter. It ran something like this: _Mrs. Carville presents her compliments to Sir Gregory Gotch, and would be obliged to him if he would inform her of the best way to article her son (aged seventeen) to the engineering profession in a manner suitable to his position._ Something like that. You can understand from that that my mother had grasped the principle of gentility all right. It went down, too, for in a few days we had an answer, in which the great man gave the names of three or four firms in London that he recommended as reliable and old-established. We selected one, and apparently Sir Gregory's name was an open sesame there, for we had an invitation to go into the city and see them at once.