"Interesting!" I muttered, trying to conceal my amazement and delight.
"The executors must proceed at once. The boy is still under the care of a governess. On the twelfth of December he will be ten years of age. The woman is to go and a man takes her place. I think I can put you in. Will you take it?"
"I?" I said, a little bewildered. "What makes you think I'm qualified for such an undertaking?"
"Because you were the best scholar in the class, and because you're a blessed philosopher with leanings toward altruism. A poor helpless little millionaire with no one to lean on must certainly excite your pity. You're just the man for the job, I tell you. And if you said you'd do it, you'd put it over."
"And if I couldn't put it over?" I laughed. "A growing youth isn't a fifteen-pound shot or a football, Ballard."
"You could if you wanted to. Five thousand a year isn't to be sneezed at."
"I assure you that I've never felt less like sneezing in my life, but--"
"Think, man," he urged, "all expenses paid, a fine house, horses, motors, the life of a country gentleman. In short, your own rooms, time to read yourself stodgy if you like, and a fine young cub to build in your own image."
"Good Lord, Pope! You always did hate 'em, you know."
"Women! No, I do not love women and I have some reasons for believing that women do not love me. I have never had any money and my particular kind of pulchritude doesn't appeal to them. Hence their indifference. Hence mine. Like begets like, Jack."
"I have reasons for believing the antipathy is deeper than that."
I shrugged the matter off. It is one which I find little pleasure in discussing.
"You may draw whatever inference you please," I finished dryly.
He lighted a cigarette and inhaled it jubilantly.
"Don't you see," he said, "that it all goes to show that you're precisely the man the governor's looking for? What do you say?"
I hesitated, though every dictate of inclination urged. Here was an opportunity to put to the test a most important theory of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge is to be elicited from within and is to be sought for in ideas and not in particulars of sense. What a chance! A growing youth in seclusion. Such a magnificent seclusion! Where I could try him in my own alembic! Still I hesitated. The imminence of such good fortune made me doubt my own efficiency.