Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/126

 "Health and good manners are not a bad foundation, Stephen."

"Better than being a half-educated young prig with no manners. I grant it. But I want my boy to be a free man. I want him to be in a position to be able to say 'Go to hell' to both capital and labour."

"Do you want to send me to hell, Stephen?"

"You are a free man, sir; that's different. But it has always seemed to me that half one's youth is wasted; fooled away, rotted with boredom. A boy just drifts, or is pushed along by his parents. You stuff him with things in which he has no interest. Why, at eighteen, after seven years at a public school"

"Exactly.—But my sympathies are with the boy who refuses to be stuffed. He comes in fresh and big at the finish."

"Yes,—I don't want to stuff the boy. If he had two or three hours coaching a day,—and could then run free. He's keen on country things,—birds—and the river. I can have him taught to box and to swim, and perhaps to manage a horse. My idea is to give him plenty of fresh air—and enough book stuff, until he shows some inclination. Or—I might send him to a good school for a year or two—after he has had a year or two's coaching."

He smiled.

"The business would be—to get him in, the son of a hotel porter."

"I think you could camouflage that," said Mr. Roland.

Sorrell began to make inquiries in Winstonbury. Neither he nor Mr. Roland knew anything of the inner life of the place, for to the people who lived in the Queen Anne and Georgian houses of the Minster Close the Pelican was nothing more than a glorified "pub." Sorrell knew a few of the tradesmen, and one of the doctors. It occurred to him that Mr. Towner who kept the in Angel Row might be considered some sort of a guide to the intellectual possibilities of Winstonbury.

Mr. Towner was able to offer a suggestion. It arose from the fact that he was one of the few Victorians left in Winstonbury who put on a top hat and went to church on Sundays, and his church was St. Peter's. St. Peter's had a curate.