rt if need be. But it is safer
to keep a steady, even pace."

"And what are you going to do for a profession, Harry? Have you made up
your mind yet?"

Harry had made up his mind to win a fellowship at Oxford, and then to
enter himself at one of the Inns of Court and read for the bar. For
physic and divinity he had no taste, but the law would suit him. Bessie
was ineffably depressed by this information: what romance is there in
the law for the imagination of eighteen? If Harry had said he was going
to throw himself on the world as a poor author, she would have bestowed
upon him a fund of interest and sympathy. To win a little of such
encouragement Harry added that while waiting for briefs he might be
forced to betake himself to the cultivation of light literature, of
journalism, or even of parliamentary reporting: many men, now of mark,
had done so. Then Bessie was better satisfied. "But oh what a prodigious
wig you will want!" was her rueful conclusion.

"Have I such a Goliath head?" Harry inquired, rubbing his large hands
through his crisp, abundant locks. They were as much all in a fuzz as
ever, but his skin was not so gloriously tanned, and his hands were
white instead of umber. Bessie noticed them: they were whiter and more
delicate than her own.

Harry Musgrave had no conceit, but plenty of confidence, and he knew
that his head was a very good head. It had room for plenty of brains,
and Harry was of opinion that it is far more desirable to be born with
a fortune in brains than with the proverbial silver spoon in one's
mouth. He would have laughed to scorn the vulgar notion that to be born
in the purple or in a wilderness of money-bags is more than an
equivalent, and would have bid you see the little value God sets on
riches by observing the people to whom He gives them. Birth, he would
have granted, ensures a man a long step at starting, but unless he have
brains his rival without ancestors will pass him in the race for
distinction. This was young Musgrave's creed at three-and-twenty. He
expounded it to Bessie, who heard him with a puzzled perception of
something left out. Harry, like many another man at the beginning of
life, reckoned without the unforeseen.

The sum of Bessie's experiences, adventures, opinions was not long. Her
mind had not matured at school as it would have done in the practical
education of home. She had acquired a graceful carriage and propriety of
behavior, and she had learned a little