“Is he?  I mean, does he?  Splendid.  But what I was going to say was this:  in view of the present social and economic disturbances and the price of coal and butter—­”

“He doesn’t need either of those yet, dear.”

“—­and the price of coal and butter, it behoves us, don’t you think, to very seriously consider (yes, I meant to split it)—­to very seriously consider Nat’s future?”

“Oh, I’ve been doing that for ever so long, Gerald.  Probably in a year or two we shan’t be able to get even a general or a char, so I’m going to teach him all sorts of household jobs—­as a great treat, of course.  Washing up the plates and dishes and laying fires—­oh, and darning as well.  He must certainly mend his own socks, and yours too.”

“Well, perhaps, if he has time.  But I have a much better proposal to make than that.  My idea is that we should bring him up to be a miner.”

“I thought children under twenty-one always were.”

“Not minor, silly—­miner.”

“Well, what’s the difference?  Saying it twice doesn’t help.  And neither does shouting,” she added.

Gerald wrote it down.

“Oh, I see.  But why?”

“Because then he can earn enough money to keep us all comfortably—­us in idle dependence at Chelsea, him in idle independence at Merthyr-Tydfil or wherever one mines.”

“He might send us diamonds now and then too.  Or perhaps it isn’t allowed.”

“No, no.  He’ll be a coal-miner, naturally.”

Margaret pondered this for some minutes.

“No, I don’t think much of your idea,” she said finally.  “Very likely coal will have gone out of fashion by then and we shall all be warming ourselves with Cape gooseberries or pine-kernels or something.  I think he ought to be taught all kinds of mining—­diamond-mining, salt-mining, gold-mining and undermining at Lloyd’s.  Then be could take up whatever was most profitable at the moment.”

“He has a busy youth ahead of him, I see.  Have you thought of anything else?”

“Not at present.  Don’t you think, though, that this little talk of ours has been rather instructive, Gerald?  Shall we open a correspondence in The Literary Supplement on ’The Boy:  What Will He Become’?”

“Not quite the sort of thing for their readers, I should say.”

“But surely some of them must be quite human.  It isn’t as if I’d said Notes and Queries.  One can’t imagine the readers of that ever—­”

“Listen!” said Gerald.  “I think I hear—­”

But Margaret had vanished.  Nat’s already pessimistic views on his future were being published for the benefit of the Man in the Street.

PART II.—­THE DISPOSAL, 1945.

The President and Committee of the British Lepidopterists’ Association request the pleasure of your company on January the 15th, at 5 P.M., when Mr. Nathaniel Prendergast will give an illustrated address on The Haunts and Habits of the minor Copperwing, together with a few Notes on Gnats.