'A woman of honourable feeling, nephew, would be careful to do nothing
to hinder you in your career, as this putting of herself in your way
most certainly will. Yet I hear that she professes a great anxiety on
this same future of yours as a physicist. The best way in which she
can show the reality of her anxiety is by leaving you to yourself.
Perhaps she persuades herself that she is doing you no harm. Well,
let her have the benefit of the possible belief; but depend upon it
that in truth she gives the lie to her conscience by maintaining such
a transparent fallacy. Women's brains are not formed for assisting at
any profound science: they lack the power to see things except in the
concrete. She'll blab your most secret plans and theories to every
one of her acquaintance--' 'She's got none!' said Swithin, beginning to get warm.
'--and make them appear ridiculous by announcing them before they are
matured. If you attempt to study with a woman, you'll be ruled by her
to entertain fancies instead of theories, air-castles instead of
intentions, qualms instead of opinions, sickly prepossessions instead
of reasoned conclusions. Your wide heaven of study, young man, will
soon reduce itself to the miserable narrow expanse of her face, and
your myriad of stars to her two trumpery eyes.
'A woman waking a young man's passions just at a moment when he is
endeavouring to shine intellectually, is doing little less than
committing a crime.
'Like a certain philosopher I would, upon my soul, have all young men
from eighteen to twenty-five kept under barrels; seeing how often, in
the lack of some such sequestering process, the woman sits down before
each as his destiny, and too frequently enervates his purpose, till he
abandons the most promising course ever conceived!
'But no more. I now leave your fate in your own hands. Your well-
wishing relative, 'JOCELYN ST. CLEEVE,
_Doctor in Medicine_.'
As coming from a bachelor and hardened misogynist of seventy-two, the
opinions herein contained were nothing remarkable: but their practical
result in restricting the sudden endowment of Swithin's researches by
conditions which turned the favour into a harassment was, at this unique
moment, discomfiting and distracting in the highest degree.
Sensational, however, as the letter was, the passionate intention of the
day was not hazarded for more than a few minutes thereby. The truth was,
the caution and bribe came too late, too unexpectedly, to be of
influence. They were the sort of thing which required fermentation to
render them effective. Had St. Cleeve received the exhortation a month
earlier; had he been able to run over in his mind, at every wakeful hour
of thirty consecutive nights, a private catechism on the possibilities
opened up by this annuity, there is no telling what might have been the
stress of such a web of perplexity upon him, a young man whose love for
celestial physics was second to none. But to have held before him, at
the last moment, the picture of a future advantage that he had never once
thought of, or discounted for present staying power, it affected him
about as much as the view of horizons shown by sheet-lightning. He saw
an immense prospect; it went, and the world was as before.