She did in truth blame herself for having given him no profession, and having acquiesced in the indolent dilettante habits which made all harder to him now; and she was not certain how far it was only his fancy that his health and nerves were perilously affected, though Dr. Medlicott, whom she secretly consulted, assured her that the only remedies needed were good sense and something to do.

At last, at Midsummer, the crisis came in a heavy discharge of bills, the consequence of Allen’s incredulity as to their poverty and incapability of economising.  He said “the rascals could wait,” and “his mother need not trouble herself.”  She said they must be paid, and she found it could be done at the cost of giving up spending August at St. Cradocke’s, as well as of breaking into her small reserve for emergencies.

But she told Allen that she insisted on his making some exertion for his own maintenance.

“Yes,” said Allen in languid assent.

“I know it is harder at your age to find occupation.”

“That is not the point.  I can easily find something to do.  There’s literature.  Or I could take up art.  And last year there was a Hungarian Count who would have given anything to get me for a tutor.”

“Then why didn’t you go?”

“Mother, you ask me why!”

“I know you had not made up your mind to the worst, but it is a pity you missed the opportunity.”

“There will be more,” said Allen loftily.  “I never meant to be a burden, but ladies are so impatient, I suppose you do not wish to turn me out instantly to seek my fortune.  No, mother, I do not mean to blame you.  You have been sadly harassed, and no woman can ever enter into what I have suffered.  Put aside those bills.  Long before Christmas, I shall be able to discharge them myself.”

So Allen wrote to Bobus’s friend at Oxford, but he of course did not keep a pocketful of Hungarian Counts.  He answered one or two advertisements for a travelling tutor, and had one personal interview, the result of which was that he could have nothing to do with such insufferable snobs.  He also concocted an advertisement beginning with “M.A., Oxford, accustomed to the best society and familiar with European languages,” but though the newspapers charged highly for it, he only received one answer, except those from agents, and that, he said with illimitable disgust, was from a Yankee.

Meantime he turned over his poems, and made Barbara copy out a ballad he had written for the “Traveller’s Joy” on some local tradition in the Tyrol.  He offered this to a magazine, whose editor, a lady, was an occasional frequenter of Mrs. Brownlow’s evenings.  The next time she came, she showed herself so much interested in the legend that Allen said he should like to show her another story, which he had written for the same domestic periodical.

“Would it serve for our Christmas number?”

“I will have it copied out and send it for you to look at,” said Allen.