“I hope you are standing the cold pretty well, sir,” he said; “spring is always so trying. I can bear the winter better myself; at all events, one does not expect anything better in December, and one makes up one’s mind to it.”
“At your age,” said old Trevor, “it was all the same to me, December or July; I liked the one as much as the other. But I think we might find something better to talk of than the weather; every idiot does that.”
“That is true,” said the young man, “it is always the first topic among English people. With our uncertain climate--”
“I never was out, of England, for my part,” the old man interrupted him sharply. “English climate is the only climate I know anything about. I don’t pretend to be superior to it, like you folks that talk of Italy and so forth. What have I got to do with Italy? It may be warmer, but warm weather never agreed with me.”
“I have never been out of England, either,” said the young man, with that persistence in the soft word that turns away wrath, which is of all things in the world the most provoking to irritable people; and then he changed the subject gently, but not to his own advantage. “I thought you would like to hear, uncle, how well everything is going on in Kent’s Lane. I am thinking of an assistant, the boys are getting beyond my management; indeed, if things go on as they are doing, I shall soon have enough to do managing, without teaching at all. I have heard of a very nice fellow, a University man. Don’t you think that, on the whole, would be an advantage? people think so much more nowadays--for the mere teaching, you know, only for the teaching--of a man with a degree.”
“A man with a fiddlestick!” said old Trevor. “The question is, are you going into competition with Eton and Harrow, Mr. Philip Rainy, or are you the master of a commercial academy, that’s the question. The man that founded that establishment hadn’t got a degree, no, nor would have accepted one if they had gone on their knees to him. He knew his place, and the sort of thing that was expected from him. Oh, surely, get your man with a degree! or go and buy a degree for yourself (it’s a matter of fees more than anything else, I have always heard), and starve when you have got it. But I’d like you to hand over Kent’s Lane first to somebody that will carry it on as it used to be.”