After breakfast she led Mr. Ponsonby to the drawing-room, and he came not altogether unprepared for objections; he had half feared them last night.

“Uncle William,” she said.  “I have been thinking over your plan, and I don’t think I quite like it.”

“I dare say not,” her uncle answered; “I can believe it; but that’s neither here nor there, as I said last night, beggars can’t be choosers.”

Julia did not, as Violet had, resent this; she was the one member of the family who was not a beggar, and she knew perfectly well she could be a chooser.  She sat down.  “Perhaps I had better say just what I mean,” she said pleasantly; “I am not going to do it.”

“Not going to?” Mr. Ponsonby repeated indignantly.  “Don’t talk nonsense; you have got to, there’s nothing else open to you; I’m not going to keep you all, feed, clothe and house you, and pay your debts into the bargain!”

“No,” said Julia; “no, naturally not; I did not think of that.”

“What did you think of, then?” her uncle demanded; he remembered that she had the nominal disposal of her own money, and though her objections were ridiculous, even impertinent in the family circumstances, they might be awkward.  “What do you object to?  I suppose you don’t like the idea of paying debts; none of you seem to.”

“No,” Julia answered; “it isn’t that; of course the debts must be paid in the way you say, it is the only way.”

“I am glad you think so,” the banker said sarcastically; “though I may as well tell you, young lady, that it would still be done even without your approval.  What is it you don’t like, spending your money for other people?”

Julia smiled a little.  “We may as well call it that,” she said; “I don’t like the boarding-house investment.”

“What do you like?  Seeing your parents go to the poorhouse?  That’s what will happen.”

“No, they can come and live with me.  I have got a large cottage, a garden, a field, and L50 a year.  If we keep pigs and poultry, and grow things in the garden we can live in the cottage on the L50 a year till the debts are all paid off; after that, of course, we should have enough to be pretty comfortable.  We need not keep a servant there, or regard appearances or humbug—­it would be very cheap.”

“And nasty,” her uncle added.  He was not impressed with the wisdom of this scheme; indeed he did not seriously contemplate it as possible.  “You are talking nonsense,” he said; “absurd, childish nonsense; you don’t know anything about it; you have no idea what life in a cottage means; the drudgery of cooking and scrubbing and so on; the doing without society and the things you are used to; as for pigs and gardening, why, you don’t know how to dig a hole or grow a cabbage!”

But he was not quite right; Julia had learnt something about drudgery in Holland, something about growing things, at least in theory, and so much about doing without the society to which she was used at home that she had absolutely no desire for it left.  She made as much of this plan to Mr. Ponsonby as was possible and desirable; enough, at all events, to convince him that she had thought out her plan in every detail and was very bent on it.