His brother smiled with gratification, and applauded him loudly: “Excellent! worthy of your best days! You’re wrong, though, in applying it to Adrian. He has never been precocious. All he has done has been to bring sound common sense to bear upon what he hears and sees. I think, however,” the baronet added, “he may want faith in the better qualities of men.” And this reflection inclined him not to let his son be alone with Adrian. He gave Richard his choice, who saw which way his father’s wishes tended, and decided so to please him. Naturally it annoyed Adrian extremely. He said to his chief: “I suppose you know what you are doing, sir. I don’t see that we derive any advantage from the family name being made notorious for twenty years of obscene suffering, and becoming a byword for our constitutional tendency to stomachic distension before we fortunately encountered Quackem’s Pill. My uncle’s tortures have been huge, but I would rather society were not intimate with them under their several headings.” Adrian enumerated some of the most abhorrent. “You know him, sir. If he conceives a duty, he will do it in the face of every decency—all the more obstinate because the conception is rare. If he feels a little brisk the morning after the pill, he sends the letter that makes us famous! We go down to posterity with heightened characteristics, to say nothing of a contemporary celebrity nothing less than our being turned inside-out to the rabble. I confess I don’t desire to have my machinery made bare to them.” Sir Austin assured the wise youth that Hippias had arranged to go to Dr. Bairam. He softened Adrian’s chagrin by telling him that in about two weeks they would follow to London: hinting also at a prospective Summer campaign. The day was fixed for Richard to depart, and the day came. Madame the Eighteenth Century called him to her chamber and put into his hand a fifty-pound note, as her contribution toward his pocket-expenses. He did not want it, he said, but she told him he was a young man, and would soon make that fly when he stood on his own feet. The old lady did not at all approve of the System in her heart, and she gave her grandnephew to understand that, should he require more, he knew where to apply, and secrets would be kept. His father presented him with a hundred pounds—which also Richard said he did not want—he did not care for money. “Spend it or not,” said the baronet, perfectly secure in him.