“A difficult time of life, Sir Austin!” said the old lawyer, shaking his head.  “We must keep our eyes on them—­keep awake!  The mischief is done in a minute.”

“We must take care to have seen where we planted, and that the root was sound, or the mischief will do itself in site of, or under the very spectacles of, supervision,” said the baronet.

His legal adviser murmured “Exactly,” as if that were his own idea, adding, “It is my plan with Ripton, who has had the honour of an introduction to you, and a very pleasant time he spent with my young friend, whom he does not forget.  Ripton follows the Law.  He is articled to me, and will, I trust, succeed me worthily in your confidence.  I bring him into town in the morning; I take him back at night.  I think I may say that I am quite content with him.”

“Do you think,” said Sir Austin, fixing his brows, “that you can trace every act of his to its motive?”

The old lawyer bent forward and humbly requested that this might be repeated.

“Do you”—­Sir Austin held the same searching expression—­“do you establish yourself in a radiating centre of intuition:  do you base your watchfulness on so thorough an acquaintance with his character, so perfect a knowledge of the instrument, that all its movements—­even the eccentric ones—­are anticipated by you, and provided for?”

The explanation was a little too long for the old lawyer to entreat another repetition.  Winking with the painful deprecation of a deaf man, Mr. Thompson smiled urbanely, coughed conciliatingly, and said he was afraid he could not affirm that much, though he was happily enabled to say that Ripton had borne an extremely good character at school.

“I find,” Sir Austin remarked, as sardonically he relaxed his inspecting pose and mien, “there are fathers who are content to be simply obeyed.  Now I require not only that my son should obey; I would have him guiltless of the impulse to gainsay my wishes—­feeling me in him stronger than his undeveloped nature, up to a certain period, where my responsibility ends and his commences.  Man is a self-acting machine.  He cannot cease to be a machine; but, though self-acting, he may lose the powers of self-guidance, and in a wrong course his very vitalities hurry him to perdition.  Young, he is an organism ripening to the set mechanic diurnal round, and while so he needs all the angels to hold watch over him that he grow straight and healthy, and fit for what machinal duties he may have to perform"...

Mr. Thompson agitated his eyebrows dreadfully.  He was utterly lost.  He respected Sir Austin’s estates too much to believe for a moment he was listening to downright folly.  Yet how otherwise explain the fact of his excellent client being incomprehensible to him?  For a middle-aged gentleman, and one who has been in the habit of advising and managing, will rarely have a notion of accusing his understanding; and Mr. Thompson had not the slightest notion of accusing his.  But the baronet’s condescension in coming thus to him, and speaking on the subject nearest his heart, might well affect him, and he quickly settled the case in favour of both parties, pronouncing mentally that his honoured client had a meaning, and so deep it was, so subtle, that no wonder he experienced difficulty in giving it fitly significant words.