If he were to be sent out to a ranch it would not help him much to know about Electra and Antigone. Less tragic heroines, and lore less elevated, would serve the purpose of the common day; or if he went into a merchant’s office, there is no commercial correspondence in Greek, even if modern Greek was the least like the classic. What, then, was the use of it? And yet the Rector would hear no reason, but kept grinding on and on. Jim had some cause for his dissatisfaction: and he could not have understood the reluctance of his father, once a scholar in his time, to resign for his son all hope of the honours which Jim neither wished for nor prized. But the Rector could not wind himself up to the point of deciding that what he fondly hoped were his boy’s talents should be hidden either in a ranch or in an office. He kept hoping, as we all hope, that fate would take some turn, that some opening would come which would still permit of a happier conclusion. And nothing was settled from day to day, and nothing done except that Sophocles, that sop to anxiety, that poor expedient to occupy the lad who hated it. It is a commonplace to add that if the vexed and unhappy Rector had contrived a means to make his son’s prospects worse and his life more untenable, he could scarcely have hit upon a better. To send him away had a hope in it, though it might have been destruction, but to keep him unwilling and embittered at home, held in this treadmill of forced and unprofitable labour, was the destruction made sure and without hope. Jim was too sore and vexed with this fate from which there seemed no escape, yet too well assured that it was his own fault, and that nothing he could do was likely to restore him to the old standing-ground in which everything that was good was hoped and believed of him--to make any manly protest against it. There was no such power in him, poor boy. It was his nature to drift, and to resent the drifting, but to take no initiative of his own. When he was upbraided, as he was so often for his idleness and uselessness, he would make angry retorts now and then, that he would work fast enough if he had anything to do except that beastly Greek: but these retorts were growled out under his breath, or flung over his shoulder as he escaped, and the angry father paid no attention to them, and did not perceive the reason that lay underneath this angry folly. Even when the Rector adjured him, as he did sometimes, to say what he would do, to strike out some path of his own, poor Jim had nothing to say. He had no path of his own; he had only an angry perception that the one upon which he was now drifting was the worst: but if they would only let him alone, Jim did not care otherwise much about it. What he proposed was to do nothing at all except a little boating and lawn tennis, or skating in winter. He did not think of the future, nor ask anything of it. If they would but let him alone.