Lady William - Mrs. Oliphant

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and top hat.’

      ‘Couldn’t you take care of the riparians and the backwaters in a top hat, if you liked?’

      ‘Oh, they like a naval man,’ said Jim; ‘their uniform gives them a little dignity, don’t you know, whereas I’m nobody.’

      ‘But it is the same in everything. You can’t be somebody all at once. You must begin low down,’ said Mab, bending her little person over her oar with that slow, steady stroke which confused Florence. Florry was choppy and irregular—one time slow, the next fast; never able to hit the time which Mab gave her with such steady composure. ‘The way to do,’ said Mab, ‘is to put everything else out of your head, as long as you are able to, and think of nothing but that. You should never mind what you like, or what you want, but just set your thoughts on what you are doing. Look at Florry; she wants to hear what we’re saying, and she wants to defend you, Jim, that I mayn’t say anything unpleasant; and the consequence is that if you were not steering against me with all your might, I should pull the boat round and round.’

      ‘Florry is only a girl, and a bad specimen,’ said Jim. ‘You should have let me pull, and then you’d have seen something like pulling.’

      ‘I am only a girl myself,’ said Mab.

      ‘But, then, you’re a good specimen,’ said the young man, with a laugh. ‘You keep your eyes in the boat.’

      ‘Which is what you don’t do, Jim!’

      ‘How do you know, you little thing, lecturing people older than yourself? I may not with Sophocles—but I do with other things.’

      ‘Which other things?’ said Mab.

      But Jim made no reply; and here Florry interposed again with strokes shorter and more irregular than ever, to talk over her cousin’s shoulder, and ask, though they were not half-way to the island, or even to the lock for that matter, whether it would be better to turn back and go home. They lay for a moment in midstream. Mab pausing on her steady oar to remonstrate, making a picture in the water, the boat floating as a bird floats in mid air, between the sky and the river, which reflected every line of cloud and stretch of blue. Some cows at the water’s edge stood double, feeding, on the very brink, and the trees still bare, but all downy with life, pushing out a greenness here and there, seemed to stretch out of the water in reflection to meet the others on the bank. Watcham lay glorified, one white house above the rest lighting up all the river with its white shadow in the stream. The boat lay like a thing enchanted with the three figures shining in afternoon light, above and below.

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      Jim strolled down into the village when the boat came to shore. It was before the hour at which he had concluded he would go home, which, as was natural, was considerably later than the hour proposed by Mab. What was the good, he said to himself, of going in before dinner, or at least before the time which was necessary to get ready for dinner? In that hour, as everybody knows, very little can be done. Mrs. Plowden and the girls would be in the drawing-room talking about what had happened in the afternoon, and the Rector would not have come in. So it was quite a certainty in Jim’s mind that no Sophocles would come of it if he had returned home when Florence did, as she begged him to do. He would not have worked; and, indeed, it would be a kind of breaking of his word if he had done so then, for had he not promised his father to work after dinner, which was quite a different thing? And it was more amusing to prowl along through the village on the outlook for anything that might happen, than to go in and listen to the girls chattering, probably about the Swinfords. And Jim was sick of the very name of the Swinfords. He had that distaste which a young man who has fallen into objectionable ways so often acquires of party-givings and society in what his mother called ‘his own rank of life.’ He flattered himself that what he did dislike was the conventionalities and stiffness of society, and that his own desire to see ‘life’ was a more original and natural sort of thing. He liked to hear what the people said when they were at their ease in inn parlours and tap-rooms. He liked, it is to be feared, what accompanied these sayings. And the more familiar he became in such localities, the more ‘out of it’ he felt in the drawing-rooms, and among the staid and quiet folk who represented society in Watcham. So that the Swinfords represented nothing but a succession of fresh annoyances to Jim. If they gave parties, as his mother and the girls hoped, he would be obliged to get himself up in gorgeous attire and take a part in these entertainments. There was a time when he, too, would have been excited by such a prospect; but that had departed after his first experiences of the life of the somewhat disreputable undergraduate, into which he had been so unfortunate as to fall. Now that he could not lounge into any resort where he could meet his peers in that class, Jim found his distaste for the home society grow upon him. He was tired to death of the girls. The old ladies bored him, which was not so wonderful. The correct old General and the clergymen about were old fogeys, which indeed was true enough. Where was the poor boy to find any one whom he could talk to with the freedom of those delightful but too brief terms at the University where he had been taught what life meant? It had been a shock to his own remaining scruples, and all the force of tradition, when he first strayed into the public-house. Oh no; not the public-house, but the little inn at Watcham, which was quite a pretty little house, all brilliant with flowers, and where people from town came down to stay in the summer; it was so nice, so quaint, so respectable, and so near the river. But it is a very different thing coming to stay at an inn for the sake of being near the river, and stealing in in the evening to the same place for society and amusement. There was nothing disreputable going on in the parlour of the ‘Swinford Arms,’ or the ‘Blue Boar,’ as it was vulgarly called, in reference to the Swinford crest, which presented that aspect to the common eye. The people who went there were respectable enough—the tradesmen in the village, good decent men who liked to see the papers and talk them over with the accompaniment of a glass of something, and a pipe: and the veterinary surgeon, who was a great deal about the country, and talked familiarly of Sir Thomas Barnes, and the Mortlocks of Wellwood, the great hunting people. It made a young man who felt acutely that he did not belong to the class of the tradesmen, more satisfied with himself to talk with a man who spoke of such people familiarly in a sort of hail-fellow well met way, even though he was only the vet. But by degrees as Jim acquired the habit of dropping in in the evenings to the ‘Blue Boar,’ he got to think that the village shopkeepers were very good fellows, and their opinions well worth hearing. So they were, indeed, as a matter of fact: solid, decent men, whose measured glass of something probably did them no harm, and whose wives were rather glad than otherwise that they had this little enlivenment in the evening of a little respectable society in the parlour of the ‘Blue Boar,’ which was itself as respectable as could be desired. But yet it was not respectable, alas! for Jim.

      When the Rector first discovered that this was where his son went when he went out in the evenings to take a walk, as he said, Mr. Plowden’s feelings would be difficult to describe. The misery, the shame, the acute and intolerable sense of downfall were perhaps exaggerated. But who can say what the descent is from the drawing-room of the Rectory to the parlour of the village public-house? which is what it really was, no doubt, though it was a most respectable little inn, and frequented in summer by the best of company. The first interview between the father and the son was very painful, but not without hope, for Jim himself was very well aware of all that it meant, and did not stand against his father’s reproaches. ‘I know it is not a place for the Rector’s son,’ he said, humbly enough. ‘It’s not a place for anybody’s son,’ the Rector said. ‘Do you think even White and Slaughter would like their sons to go there?’ This was an argument Jim was not prepared for, and he acknowledged with humility that he did not think they would. The Rector was very gentle with the boy that first time. He pointed out that for Slaughter and White, and even the vet., it was a sort of club where they went to meet their friends—and whether or not there might be any objections morally to their glass of something, yet at all events it was a very moderate indulgence, and went no further. ‘I don’t say it is quite right even for them; but that’s a very different question,’ Mr. Plowden said, and Jim acknowledged the self-evident

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