“No, confound him. He says it would be preposterous at his age—he’s not a year older than I am! I wonder if he expects me to ask Baby Bramble, or one of those little boys in the Buffs! Anyway it won’t be Doyle, for he goes to England, end of February—to get out of it, I believe.” “I’m not sorry,” Rhoda answered; but it would have been difficult for her to explain, at the moment, why she was not sorry. CHAPTER IV. “I don’t mind telling you,” said Philip Doyle, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, “that, personally, His Acting Honour represents to me a number of objectionable things. He is a Radical, and a Low Churchman, and a Particularist. He’s that objectionable ethical mixture, a compound of petty virtues. He believes this earth was created to give him an atmosphere to do his duty in; and he does it with the invincible courage of short-sightedness combined with the notion that the ultimate court of appeal for eighty million Bengalis should be his precious Methodist conscience. But the brute’s honest, and if he insists on putting this University foolishness of his through, I’m sorry for him. He’s a dead man, politically, the day it is announced.” “He is,” replied Ancram, concentrating his attention on a match and the end of his cigar. “There’s—no doubt—about that.” The two men were smoking after dinner, with the table and a couple of decanters between them. Roses drooped over the bowl of Cutch silver that gleamed in the middle of the empty cloth, and a lemon leaf or two floated in the finger-glass at Ancram’s elbow. He threw the match into it, and looked across at Doyle with his cigar between his teeth in the manner which invites further discussion. “In point of political morality I suppose he’s right enough——” “He generally is,” Ancram interrupted. “He’s got a scent for political morality keen enough to upset every form of Government known to the nineteenth century.” “But they see political morality through another pair of spectacles in England. To withdraw State aid from education anywhere at this end of the century is as impracticable as it would be to deprive the British workman of his vote. It’s retrogressive, and this is an age which will admit anything except a mistake of its own.” “He doesn’t intend to withdraw State aid from education. He means to spend the money on technical schools.” “A benevolent intention. But it won’t make the case any better with the Secretary of State. He will say that it ought to be done without damaging the sacred cause of higher culture.”