When a
man has worked as Mr. Low had worked, he begins to regard the bench
wistfully, and to calculate the profits of a two years' run in the
Attorney-Generalship. It is the way of the profession, and thus a
proper and sufficient number of real barristers finds its way into
the House. Mr. Low had been angry with Phineas because he, being a
barrister, had climbed into it after another fashion, having taken
up politics, not in the proper way as an assistance to his great
profession, but as a profession in itself. Mr. Low had been quite
sure that his pupil had been wrong in this, and that the error would
at last show itself, to his pupil's cost. And Mrs. Low had been more
sure than Mr. Low, having not unnaturally been jealous that a young
whipper-snapper of a pupil,--as she had once called Phineas,--should
become a Parliament man before her husband, who had worked his way
up gallantly, in the usual course. She would not give way a jot even
now,--not even when she heard that Phineas was going to marry this
and that heiress. For at this period of his life such rumours were
afloat about him, originating probably in his hopes as to Violet
Effingham and his intimacy with Madame Goesler. "Oh, heiresses!"
said Mrs. Low. "I don't believe in heiresses' money till I see it.
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