Francis went to Plymouth and saw his solicitor, who pointed out that it was a matter of great expense and meant supporting the boy until he was over thirty. Francis felt that the problem was insoluble, gave it up for the time being, and consoled himself with buying a parrot from a drunken sailor and a dog in a fancier's shop by the docks because it was impossible to tell which was its head and which was its tail. He called the dog "Muff" and the parrot "Sailor." Frederic sulked when he learned that he was not to go to the Bar and went down to the village inn and came home very drunk. When he was reproved, he asked what else there was to do in such a dead-alive hole, and his father found it very difficult to reply. It was painfully forced upon his attention that Frederic also had a mind, and that it worked in a way entirely different from his own. This was distressing, because for many years Francis had done all the thinking necessary for his family, and that no great amount. He had an intolerable sense of being cooped up with an enemy, and what bewildered him most of all was to think that the enemy should be his own son. He could not explain it to his wife, or to himself, for that matter, but there it was, and he was thankful when Frederic chose to absent himself from meals. At last, after much cogitation, he approached his wife with the suggestion that they should make Frederic a solicitor. "An attorney!" said Martha, and Francis knew that she was thinking of the common, dusty little man in Plymouth. Parents who have aspired to make their sons physicians and been forced to stop short at dentistry will understand what torture it was to Martha Folyat, and, in a less degree, to her husband, to descend from the higher to the lower branch of the legal profession--no wig, no gown, no access to the Bench, no prospective knighthood. It was a pill and they swallowed it, putting as brave a face on it as possible, and they were somewhat comforted when they found, upon inquiry, that a family of undoubted gentility in the county had sent their son into a solicitor's office in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. Martha's ambition leaped within her, and she suggested that Frederic also should be sent to London where he was more likely, if not to meet, at least to handle the affairs of, the aristocracy. Who knows? Even the Royal Family had legal business, and there was a great case coming on to decide the succession of the collateral Folyats, somewhat complicated by a bigamous old clergyman who for his third wife had taken a negress in Africa. The case would be ripe just about the time Frederic was qualified, and Willie Folyat, a possible heir, was one of Minna's most devoted admirers.