He paused a moment, stroking his beard, with his head inclined and one eye half-closed, looking at Rowland.  The look was grotesque, but it was significant, and it puzzled Rowland more than it amused him.  “I suppose you ’re a very brilliant young man,” he went on, “very enlightened, very cultivated, quite up to the mark in the fine arts and all that sort of thing.  I ’m a plain, practical old boy, content to follow an honorable profession in a free country.  I did n’t go off to the Old World to learn my business; no one took me by the hand; I had to grease my wheels myself, and, such as I am, I ’m a self-made man, every inch of me!  Well, if our young friend is booked for fame and fortune, I don’t suppose his going to Rome will stop him.  But, mind you, it won’t help him such a long way, either.  If you have undertaken to put him through, there ’s a thing or two you ’d better remember.  The crop we gather depends upon the seed we sow.  He may be the biggest genius of the age:  his potatoes won’t come up without his hoeing them.  If he takes things so almighty easy as—­well, as one or two young fellows of genius I ’ve had under my eye—­his produce will never gain the prize.  Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does n’t believe that we ’ll wake up to find our work done because we ’ve lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!  If your young protajay finds things easy and has a good time and says he likes the life, it ’s a sign that—­as I may say—­you had better step round to the office and look at the books.  That ’s all I desire to remark.  No offense intended.  I hope you ’ll have a first-rate time.”

Rowland could honestly reply that this seemed pregnant sense, and he offered Mr. Striker a friendly hand-shake as the latter withdrew.  But Mr. Striker’s rather grim view of matters cast a momentary shadow on his companions, and Mrs. Hudson seemed to feel that it necessitated between them some little friendly agreement not to be overawed.

Rowland sat for some time longer, partly because he wished to please the two women and partly because he was strangely pleased himself.  There was something touching in their unworldly fears and diffident hopes, something almost terrible in the way poor little Mrs. Hudson seemed to flutter and quiver with intense maternal passion.  She put forth one timid conversational venture after another, and asked Rowland a number of questions about himself, his age, his family, his occupations, his tastes, his religious opinions.  Rowland had an odd feeling at last that she had begun to consider him very exemplary, and that she might make, later, some perturbing discovery.  He tried, therefore, to invent something that would prepare her to find him fallible.  But he could think of nothing.  It only seemed to him that Miss Garland secretly mistrusted him, and that he must leave her to render him the service, after he had gone, of making him the object of a little firm derogation.  Mrs. Hudson talked with low-voiced eagerness about her son.