He declines
to choose a profession."
"He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose."
"I have always given him and his friends reason to understand
that I would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing
him with a scholarly education, and launching him respectably.
I am-therefore bound to fulfil the expectation so raised,"
said Mr. Casaubon, putting his conduct in the light of mere rectitude:
a trait of delicacy which Dorothea noticed with admiration.
"He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce
or a Mungo Park," said Mr. Brooke. "I had a notion of that myself
at one time."
"No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement
of our geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could
recognize with some approbation, though without felicitating him
on a career which so often ends in premature and violent death.
But so far is he from having any desire for a more accurate knowledge
of the earth's surface, that he said he should prefer not to know
the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown
regions preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination."
"Well, there is something in that, you know," said Mr. Brooke,
who had certainly an impartial mind.
"It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy
and indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad
augury for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he
so far submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one.
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