‘Unless one of us were to break out into a Walter Scott, or discover a new motive power to supersede steam, I don’t see how it’s to be done,’ Kenrick said to Mrs. Dulcimer, in one of his confidential talks with that good-natured lady, who knew all that he could tell her about the mortgages and the property. ‘The army won’t do it--and the church won’t do it--and the law wouldn’t do it under thirty years’ work. Engineering might do it, perhaps, if we could blossom into Brunels, and get contracts for railways and things; but, you see, neither of us has a turn for engineering.’ ‘You ought both to marry heiresses,’ suggested Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘Oh no, that’s horrid. We couldn’t do that,’ cried Kenrick. ‘That’s too contemptible.’ This was how Kenrick had talked at seventeen, when he was in his state of tutelage. He was more reticent about himself and his prospects now, at nine-and-twenty, but Mrs. Dulcimer had forgotten nothing, and when Kenrick looked grave, she always thought he was brooding upon the mortgages. ‘I know that the dearest wish of his heart is to redeem the family position,’ she said, and this was what set her thinking about a marriage between Sir Kenrick and old Mr. Harefield’s only daughter and heiress. Cyril had gone into the church. He loved his profession for its own sake, and thought very little of the loaves and fishes. He would like to be a bishop, no doubt, when his time came; but it was for the sake of having a great influence and doing things in his own way, not for social status or income, that he would have desired a mitre. Doing things in his own way--that was Cyril’s idea of a perfect life. To make his church beautiful, according to his idea of beauty, to have good music, and a strict adherence to the rubrics in Edward the Sixth’s Prayer-book, to infuse something of the poetry of old traditions into the prosaic expression of a reformed faith--to train his flock in his own way of thinking--to create for himself an enthusiastic and fervent congregation. These were the things which Cyril Culverhouse believed he had been sent into the world to do--rather than to help his cousin to pay off the mortgages, which mattered very little, so long as poor Ken had money enough to live upon.