But Jim Plowden! that was a very different thing from Mrs. Lloyd. I do not for a moment believe that Mr. Osborne would have hesitated to take the pledge for and with Jim: but that was not at all what Florence had suggested. She had suggested that he should admit him to his society, take him for a companion, induce him to share in his pursuits--that last above all. She did not know, of course, that among the drawbacks to herself, of all of which Mr. Osborne was so conscious, her brother and her family took the first place. He would need to be friendly, or even more than friendly, with all the Plowdens. Nothing but the fact that Florence was unique in the world, that there was none like her, none, could make up for that. And now she demanded of him that he should take her brother into his bosom, so to speak, not as a consequence of being accepted by her, but as a matter of duty in his capacity as a priest, as a better way than that of taking the pledge along with old Mrs. Lloyd. That lout! he repeated to himself: that fellow to whom had been given all the same advantages as other people, even as Mr. Edward Osborne, and who had thrown, or was throwing, them away: the brother, who frequented the ‘Blue Boar,’ who was the friend of the schoolmistress, who shunned all the ordinary assemblages of his kind; and yet it was suggested to him that to take up this rowdy undergraduate, sent down from Oxford, would be the better way! Is it to be wondered at if Mr. Osborne was angry?--if, whenever it came into his head, for as long a time as a fortnight after, he flung down whatever he was doing and turned aside to something else that would be more exciting, to forget the exasperations to which he had been exposed? But this did not effectually chase the suggestion, it appeared, out of his mind. It recurred to him at times when he could not chase it away; in the middle of the night, for instance, when he could not jump out of bed and write a letter to a temperance newspaper, and when it bored in quietly to his brain, like some fine, delicate instrument used by a cunning, persistent hand. It was not the hand of Florence, it was that of some demon, or some angel, or his own. Had he, after all, perhaps as much responsibility for Jim Plowden as for Mrs. Lloyd? Was Jim Plowden, perhaps, in his youth, and with certain faculties that might be of use in the world, of as much, nay, even of more importance, than the old washer-woman? Strange questions for a young idealist, a young man deeply compassionate of the poor, deeply indignant as concerns those who throw their own advantages, their own education, and other good gifts away.