Certainly her mind is comparatively at rest regarding them both,
notwithstanding my second troy is not quite like other people. I do
not mean that he is boorish or eccentric, merely that he is bookish and
self-absorbed. He takes no interest in his personal appearance, and he
avoids every young woman except his sisters. Fred is dandified, keenly
fond of the social interests of the day and of the other sex. I
foresee that he bids fair to be a leading man of affairs, and to figure
prominently in society, and later on to become a member of Congress or
to be sent abroad as a foreign minister. But he is just like everybody
else, so to speak; or rather he accepts the world as he finds it and
accommodates himself to it. Now, David is cast in a different mould.
He is essentially unconventional. And yet, though his mother sighs now
and then over his repugnance to young ladies, and tries to badger him
into looking a little more spruce, I can perceive that she is
thoroughly proud of his originality and independence, and believes that
he is even more likely than his conventional brother to distinguish
himself and immortalize the family name. Josephine used to say, when
the boys were little, that she hoped one of them would be a clergyman,
and I know that she has more sympathy than I--and I have
considerable--with a scheme of life which entertains starving in a
garret for the sake of art or science as a meritorious contingency.
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