deal for something to do. There was always
the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite
one of the best fellows; he knew that. He had not money enough for
politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public
service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally
into journalism. Anything involving further examinations he rejected
on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were
doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick.
Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long
enough.

Lorne Murchison had never met anyone of Hesketh's age in Hesketh's
condition before. Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement;
poverty and youth he knew, embarked in the struggle; indolence and youth
he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence,
equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in
fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle. He himself had
intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen. There never had been any
impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire. He was
still under his father's roof, but that was for the general happiness;
any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry
fate, he might have selected another. He was younger than Hesketh by
a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still
fidgeting at the starting-point.

"Why don't you farm?" he asked once.

"Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before. I
can't wait for it. Besides, why should I farm? Why didn't you?"

"Well," said Lorne, "in your case it seems about the only thing left. I?
Oh it doesn't attract us over there. We're getting away from it--leaving
it to the newcomers from this side. Curious circle, that: I wonder when
our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?"

Hesketh's situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had
a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere
short of the flag. The imperial idea was very much at the moment in the
public mind; it hung heavily, like a banner, in every newspaper, it
was filtering through the slow British consciousness, solidifying as it
travelled. In the end it might be expected to arrive at a shape in which
the British consciousness must either assimilate it or cast it forth.
They were saying in the suburbs th