The solicitor and his clerk witnessed; I kept one copy
myself and handed the other to Miss Pontifex's solicitor.
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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