Charles set up his eyebrows sarcastically.
'How does he get on with Philip?' inquired Laura.
'Excellently. Just what could be wished. Philip is delighted with him; and I have been telling Guy all the way home what a capital friend he will be, and he is quite inclined to look up to him.' Charles made an exaggerated gesture of astonishment, unseen by his father. 'I told him to bring his dog. He would have left it, but they seemed so fond of each other, I thought it was a pity to part them, and that I could promise it should be welcome here; eh, mamma?'
'Certainly. I am very glad you brought it.'
'We are to have his horse and man in a little while. A beautiful chestnut--anything to raise his spirits. He is terribly cut up about his grandfather.
It was now time to go down to dinner; and after Charles had made faces of weariness and disgust at all the viands proposed to him by his mother, almost imploring him to like them, and had at last ungraciously given her leave to send what he could not quite say he disliked, he was left to carry on his teasing of Charlotte, and his grumbling over the dinner, for about the space of an hour, when Amabel came back to him, and Charlotte went down.
'Hum!' he exclaimed. 'Another swan of my father's.'
'Did not you like his looks?'
'I saw only an angular hobbetyhoy.'
'But every one at Redclyffe speaks so well of him.'
'As if the same things were not said of every heir to more acres than brains! However, I could have swallowed everything but the disposition to adore Philip. Either it was gammon on his part, or else the work of my father's imagination.'
'For shame, Charlie.'
'Is it within the bounds of probability that he should be willing, at the bidding of his guardian, to adopt as Mentor his very correct and sententious cousin, a poor subaltern, and the next in the entail? Depend upon it, it is a fiction created either by papa's hopes or Philip's self-complacency, or else the unfortunate youth must have been brought very low by strait-lacing and milk-and-water.'
'Mr. Thorndale is willing to look up to Philip,' 'I don't think the Thorndale swan very--very much better than a tame goose,' said Charles, 'but the coalition is not so monstrous in his case, since Philip was a friend of his own picking and choosing, and so his father's adoption did not succeed in repelling him. But that Morville should receive this "young man's companion," on the word of a guardian whom he never set eyes on before, is too incredible--utterly mythical I assure you, Amy. And how did you get on at dinner?'