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"Three thousand a year!" cried David. It seemed to him a very large income.

"And the house," added Bevans.

"You must never go near the place, Austin," said his friend. "If you do, all the little darlings will fall in love with you, and their parents will take them away and the school will be ruined."

"Not go near it!" said Bevans. "I shall live there and direct it exactly as my aunt did—only not in the same direction."

"You're mad," cried David. "You at the head of a girls' school!"

"There's money in it and I need money."

"Your face would wreck a thousand schools," cried the other, with conviction.

David's opposition was not to be shaken. He was naturally inclined to conservatism, ​and the study of the law had not rendered him more liberal. He had never before heard of a man under thirty owning and managing a girls' school, and therefore for that reason alone he considered the idea inherently wrong. He attempted to argue the question also on practical grounds, but the true basis of his disapproval was its newness. Bevans, on the other hand, with a streak of creativeness in his make-up, was attracted to an idea by its mere unfamiliarity. For David's constantly reiterated assertion that he would make himself ridiculous he cared nothing. What, he asked, could be more ridiculous than to let slip one's great opportunity?