ited. 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."

"Where is he now?" I asked. He laughed.

"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.

"We went, the gentlemanly youth and his ladylike mother, and saw the
heads of the firm. We discovered then, that there were two ways of
learning engineering, an easy way and a hard way. People say there's no
royal road to learning. Like most proverbs, it's a