Before leaving, however, she promised to
sound him on the plan of placing Trotty as a weekly boarder at a Young
Ladies' Seminary, and taking the infant in her place. For it came out
that John intended to set Zara--Zara, but newly returned from a second
voyage to England and still sipping like a bee at the sweets of various
situations--at the head of his house once more. And Mary could not
imagine Zara rearing a baby.
Equally hard was it to understand John not having learnt wisdom from his
two previous failures to live with his sister. But, in seeking tactfully
to revive his memory, she ran up against such an ingrained belief in the
superiority of his own kith and kin that she was baffled, and could only
fold her hands and hope for the best.
"Besides, Jane's children are infinitely more tractable than poor
Emma's," was John's parting shot.--Strange, thought Mary, how attached
John was to his second family.
He had still another request to make of her. The reports he received of
the boy Johnny, now a pupil at the Geelong Grammar School, grew worse
from term to term. It had become clear to him that he was unfortunate
enough to possess an out-and-out dullard for a son. Regretfully giving
up, therefore, the design he had cherished of educating Johnny for the
law, he had resolved to waste no more good money on the boy, but to take
him, once he was turned fifteen, into his own business. Young John,
however, had proved refractory, expressing a violent antipathy to the
idea of office-life.
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