Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) SONS AND DAUGHTERS SONS AND DAUGHTERS _A NOVEL_ BY MRS OLIPHANT SECOND EDITION WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCXCI SONS AND DAUGHTERS. CHAPTER I. “Then you will not take the share in the business which I have offered you?” “No, I think not, sir. I don’t like it. I don’t like the way in which it is worked. It would be entirely out of accordance with all my training.” “So much the worse for your training--and for you,” said Mr Burton, hastily. “Well, sir, perhaps so. I feel it’s ungenerous to say that the training was your own choice, not mine. I think it, of course, the best training in the world.” “So it is--so it was when I selected it for you. There’s no harm in the training. Few boys come out of it with your ridiculous prejudices against their bread and butter. It’s not the training, it’s you--that are a fool, Gervase.” “Perhaps so, sir,” said the young man with great gravity. “I can offer no opinion on that subject.” The father and son were seated together in a well-furnished library in a large house in Harley Street--not fashionable, but extremely comfortable, spacious, expensive, and dignified. It was a library in the truest sense of the word, and not merely the “gentleman’s room” in which the male portion of a family takes refuge. There was an excellent collection of books on the shelves that lined the walls, a few good pictures, a bust or two placed high on the tops of the bookcases. It bore signs, besides, of constant occupation, and of being, in short, the room in which its present occupants lived--which was the fact. They were all their family. Mrs Burton had died years before, and her husband had after her death lived only for his boy and--his business. The latter devotion kept everything that was sentimental out of the former. He was very kind and indulgent to Gervase, and gave him the ideal English education--the education of an English gentleman: five or six years at Eton, three or four at Oxford. He intended to do, and did, his son “every justice.” Expense had never been spared in any way. Though he did not himself care for shooting, he had taken a moor in the Highlands for several successive seasons, in order that his boy should be familiar with that habit of the higher classes. Though he hated travelling, he had gone abroad for the same purpose. Gervase had never been stinted in anything: he had a good allowance, rooms handsomely furnished, horses at his disposal, everything that heart could desire. And he on his part had