This compromise was accepted by Christina who forthwith, ill as she was,
entered with ardour into the new position, and taking it as a fresh point
of departure, began spending Ernest's money for him.
I may say in passing that Christina was right in saying that Theobald had
never had so much money as his son was now possessed of. In the first
place he had not had a fourteen years' minority with no outgoings to
prevent the accumulation of the money, and in the second he, like myself
and almost everyone else, had suffered somewhat in the 1846 times--not
enough to cripple him or even seriously to hurt him, but enough to give
him a scare and make him stick to debentures for the rest of his life. It
was the fact of his son's being the richer man of the two, and of his
being rich so young, which rankled with Theobald even more than the fact
of his having money at all. If he had had to wait till he was sixty or
sixty-five, and become broken down from long failure in the meantime, why
then perhaps he might have been allowed to have whatever sum should
suffice to keep him out of the workhouse and pay his death-bed expenses;
but that he should come in to 70,000 pounds at eight and twenty, and have
no wife and only two children--it was intolerable.
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