“We will turn over my Italian engravings together,” continued that good-natured man.  “I have no end of those things, that I have laid by for years.  One gets rusty in this part of the country, you know.  Not you, Casaubon; you stick to your studies; but my best ideas get undermost—­out of use, you know.  You clever young men must guard against indolence.  I was too indolent, you know:  else I might have been anywhere at one time.”

“That is a seasonable admonition,” said Mr. Casaubon; “but now we will pass on to the house, lest the young ladies should be tired of standing.”

When their backs were turned, young Ladislaw sat down to go on with his sketching, and as he did so his face broke into an expression of amusement which increased as he went on drawing, till at last he threw back his head and laughed aloud.  Partly it was the reception of his own artistic production that tickled him; partly the notion of his grave cousin as the lover of that girl; and partly Mr. Brooke’s definition of the place he might have held but for the impediment of indolence.  Mr. Will Ladislaw’s sense of the ludicrous lit up his features very agreeably:  it was the pure enjoyment of comicality, and had no mixture of sneering and self-exaltation.

“What is your nephew going to do with himself, Casaubon?” said Mr. Brooke, as they went on.

“My cousin, you mean—­not my nephew.”

“Yes, yes, cousin.  But in the way of a career, you know.”

“The answer to that question is painfully doubtful.  On leaving Rugby he declined to go to an English university, where I would gladly have placed him, and chose what I must consider the anomalous course of studying at Heidelberg.  And now he wants to go abroad again, without any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture, preparation for he knows not what.  He declines to choose a profession.”

“He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose.”

“I have always given him and his friends reason to understand that I would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing him with a scholarly education, and launching him respectably.  I am-therefore bound to fulfil the expectation so raised,” said Mr. Casaubon, putting his conduct in the light of mere rectitude:  a trait of delicacy which Dorothea noticed with admiration.

“He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a Mungo Park,” said Mr. Brooke.  “I had a notion of that myself at one time.”

“No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our geognosis:  that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so often ends in premature and violent death.  But so far is he from having any desire for a more accurate knowledge of the earth’s surface, that he said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination.”