look
        out for something else? I know that neither you nor John wish me to go
        into your business, nor do I understand anything about money matters,
        but is there nothing else that I can do? I do not like to ask you to
        maintain me while I go in for medicine or the bar, but when I get my
        fellowship which should not be long, first I will endeavour to cost you
        nothing further, and I might make a little money by writing or taking
        pupils. I trust you will not think this letter improper; nothing is
        further from my wish than to cause you any uneasiness; I hope you will
        make allowance for my present feelings which indeed spring from nothing
        but from that respect for my conscience, which no one has so often
        instilled into me as yourself. Pray let me have a few lines shortly. I
        hope your cold is better; with love to Eliza and Maria, I am your
        affectionate son,
                                                             Theobald Pontifex.«
 
        »Dear Theobald, I can enter into your feelings, and have no wish to
        quarrel with your expression of them. It is quite right and natural that
        you should feel as you do except as regards one passage, the impropriety
        of which you will yourself doubtless feel upon reflection, and to which
        I will not further allude than to say that it has wounded me. You should
        not have said, in spite of my scholarships. It was only proper that if
        you could do anything to assist me in bearing the heavy burden of your
        education, the money should be, as it was, made over to myself. Every
        line in your letter convinces me that you are under the influence of a
        morbid sensitiveness which is one of the devil's favourite devices for
        luring people to their destruction. I have, as you say, been at great
        expense with your education. Nothing has been spared by me to give you
        the advantages which as an English gentleman I was anxious to afford my
        son, but I am not prepared to see that expense thrown away, and to have
        to begin again from the beginning, merely because you have taken some
        foolish scruples in your head, which you should resist as no less unjust
        to yourself than to me. Don't give way to that restless desire for
        change which is the bane of so many persons of both sexes at the present
        day. Of course you needn't be ordained: nobody will compel you; you are
        perfectly free; you are twenty-three years of age and should know your
        own mind; but why not have known it sooner, instead of never so much