cipline, I'm glad to say. Well, are you enjoying school?"

The old lady paused with her scissors gaping, and looked shrewdly at
Michael.

"I'm getting rather fed up with it," Michael admitted. "It goes on for
such a long time. It wasn't so bad this term, though."

Then he remembered that whatever pleasures had mitigated the
exasperation of school last term were decidedly unscholastic, and he
blushed.

"I simply loathed it for a time," he added.

"Alan informs me he acquired his first eleven cap this term and will be
in the first fifteen as Lord Treasurer or something," Mrs. Carthew went
on. "Naturally he must enjoy this shower of honours. Alan is decidedly
typical of the better class of unthinking young Englishman. He is
pleasant to look at--a little colt-like perhaps, but that will soon wear
off. My own dear boy was very like him, and Maud's dear husband was much
the same. You, I'm afraid, think too much, Michael."

"Oh, no, I don't think very much," said Michael, disclaiming philosophy,
and greatly afraid that Mrs. Carthew was supposing him a prig.

"You needn't be ashamed of thinking," she said. "After all, the amount
you think now won't seriously disorganize the world. But you seem to me
old for your age, much older than Alan for instance, and though your
conversation with me at any rate is not mature, nevertheless you convey
somehow an impression of maturity that I cannot quite account for."

Michael could not understand why, when for the first time he was
confronted with somebody who gave his precocity its due, he was unable
to discuss it eagerly and voluminously, why he should half resent being
considered older than Alan.

"Don't look so cross with me," Mrs. Carthew commanded. "I am an old
woman, and I have a perfect right to say what I please to you. Besides,
you and I have had many conversations, and I take a great interest in
you. What are you going to be?"

"Well, that's what I can't find out," said Michael desperately. "I know
what I'm not going to be, and that's all."

"That's a good deal, I think," said Mrs. Carthew. "Pray tell me what
professions you have condemned."

"I'm not going into the Army. I'm not going into the Civil Service. I'm
not going to be a doctor or a lawyer."

"Or a parson?" asked Mrs. Carthew, crunching through so many lupin
stalks at once that they fell with a rattle on to the path.

"Well, I have thought about being a parson," Michael slowly granted.
"But I don't thin