Occasionally, when he was ‘dead in earnest,’ as he said, he could surmount both defects. He would then speak tersely and clearly while he towered the head and shoulders above his brethren, and flung out an arm with something like might and majesty. But, as a rule, a singular shyness and self-consciousness came over the young man in any general assemblage, from a debating club upwards, and left him a fettered and dumb giant. ‘I should make a bad advocate and a worse judge,’ said Oliver; ‘I have not the making of a good lawyer in me—none of the sifting impartiality, critical acumen, and hard-headed common sense which ought to dispense justice. My own ideas, instead of authorities and precedents, would possess me. You have only to put on a wig and gown in order to be a sounder, safer judge yourself, though I can’t flatter you, little woman, by pretending you would prove another Portia.’ ‘But a clergyman is different,’ said Fan, faintly. He shook the whole man, not his head alone, in his impatience. ‘Do you suppose I should think myself warranted in becoming a clergyman if I had not the highest motive and the clearest bent?’ he demanded, with more indignant sharpness than he had yet spoken. ‘I would rather break stones on the road. I might preserve my self-respect as an honest man while I hammered at flints; I should certainly despise myself as a profane cheat and liar if I offered spiritual stones for bread—all because the Church was a gentleman’s calling, and by great good fortune, policy, energy, and carefully cultivated interest I might die a right reverend bishop. I wonder though if a miller and baker’s son ever did die a bishop—out of the colonies,’ speculated Oliver with returning good humour. ‘Oliver,’ said Fan, solemnly, ‘I cannot think you are in earnest. I seem not able to believe my ears. After father resigned your services, after you have kept all your terms, taken more than one scholarship and gained this first class, which everybody who knows anything about it said you could do, and added that it would be a great honour to you and the making of you in any profession, to throw it all up in the end, to act as if you had been keeping another man out of his place, and wasting money the whole time! For you would have made as good—I should say a far better miller,’ (Fan could not bring herself to say the word baker,) ‘if you had never gone to Oxford, if you had left the Grammar School when you were fourteen or fifteen at the latest, and served your apprenticeship like other lads who meant to be tradesmen, and then father might have had your help in his old age.’ ‘There is something in that,’ answered Oliver in a low tone, with the pain which the reminder roused in him perceptible in his voice. ‘I shall never cease to regret that I did not see things as I do now from the first. I would give a great deal even to have made up my mind sooner—in time to tell father. But nothing will convince me that he would have opposed my decision.’