When all this had been done she became more easy in her mind. She
talked principally about her nephew. "Don't scold him," she said,
"if he is volatile, and continually takes things up only to throw them
down again. How can he find out his strength or weakness otherwise?
A man's profession," she said, and here she gave one of her wicked
little laughs, "is not like his wife, which he must take once for all,
for better for worse, without proof beforehand. Let him go here and
there, and learn his truest liking by finding out what, after all,
he catches himself turning to most habitually -then let him stick to
this; but I daresay Ernest will be forty or five-and-forty before he
settles down. Then all his previous infidelities will work together to
him for good if he is the boy I hope he is.
"Above all," she continued, "do not let him work up to his full
strength, except once or twice in his lifetime; nothing is well done
nor worth doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty
easily. Theobald and Christina would give him a pinch of salt and tell
him to put it on the tails of the seven deadly virtues"; -here she
laughed again in her old manner at once so mocking and so sweet- "I
think if he likes pancakes he had perhaps better eat them on Shrove
Tuesday, but this is enough.
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