in those days that the inner pocket of his coat was stuffed with papers; he would see Lucian walking up and down in a secret shady place at the bottom of the orchard, reading from his sheaf of manuscript, replacing the leaves, and again drawing them out.  He would walk a few quick steps, and pause as if enraptured, gazing in the air as if he looked through the shadows of the world into some sphere of glory, feigned by his thought.  Mr. Taylor was almost alarmed at the sight; he concluded of course that Lucian was writing a book.  In the first place, there seemed something immodest in seeing the operation performed under one’s eyes; it was as if the “make-up” of a beautiful actress were done on the stage, in full audience; as if one saw the rounded calves fixed in position, the fleshings drawn on, the voluptuous outlines of the figure produced by means purely mechanical, blushes mantling from the paint-pot, and the golden tresses well secured by the wigmaker.  Books, Mr. Taylor thought, should swim into one’s ken mysteriously; they should appear all printed and bound, without apparent genesis; just as children are suddenly told that they have a little sister, found by mamma in the garden.  But Lucian was not only engaged in composition; he was plainly rapturous, enthusiastic; Mr. Taylor saw him throw up his hands, and bow his head with strange gesture.  The parson began to fear that his son was like some of those mad Frenchmen of whom he had read, young fellows who had a sort of fury of literature, and gave their whole lives to it, spending days over a page, and years over a book, pursuing art as Englishmen pursue money, building up a romance as if it were a business.  Now Mr. Taylor held firmly by the “walking-stick” theory; he believed that a man of letters should have a real profession, some solid employment in life.  “Get something to do,” he would have liked to say, “and then you can write as much as you please.  Look at Scott, look at Dickens and Trollope.”  And then there was the social point of view; it might be right, or it might be wrong, but there could be no doubt that the literary man, as such, was not thought much of in English society.  Mr. Taylor knew his Thackeray, and he remembered that old Major Pendennis, society personified, did not exactly boast of his nephew’s occupation.  Even Warrington was rather ashamed to own his connection with journalism, and Pendennis himself laughed openly at his novel-writing as an agreeable way of making money, a useful appendage to the cultivation of dukes, his true business in life.  This was the plain English view, and Mr. Taylor was no doubt right enough in thinking it good, practical common sense.  Therefore when he saw Lucian loitering and sauntering, musing amorously over his manuscript, exhibiting manifest signs that he fine fury which Britons have ever found absurd, he felt grieved at heart, and more than ever sorry that he had not been able to send the boy to Oxford.

“B.N.C. would have knocked all this nonsense out of him,” he thought.  “He would have taken a double First like my poor father and made something of a figure in the world.  However, it can’t be helped.”  The poor man sighed, and lit his pipe, and walked in another part of the garden.