last words when her son started on his mission.

"If Geoffrey doesn't jump at what I am going to offer him," was the
son's reply, "I shall agree with my father that the case is hopeless;
and I shall end, like my father, in giving Geoffrey up."

This was strong language for Julius to use. It was not easy to rouse the
disciplined and equable temperament of Lord Holchester's eldest son.
No two men were ever more thoroughly unlike each other than these two
brothers. It is melancholy to acknowledge it of the blood relation of
a "stroke oar," but it must be owned, in the interests of truth, that
Julius cultivated his intelligence. This degenerate Briton could digest
books--and couldn't digest beer. Could learn languages--and couldn't
learn to row. Practiced the foreign vice of perfecting himself in the
art of playing on a musical instrument and couldn't learn the English
virtue of knowing a good horse when he saw him. Got through life.
(Heaven only knows how!) without either a biceps or a betting-book.
Had openly acknowledged, in English society, that he didn't think the
barking of a pack of hounds the finest music in the world. Could go to
foreign parts, and see a mountain which nobody had ever got to the top
of yet--and didn't instantly feel his honor as an Englishman involved in
getting to the top of it himself. Such people may, and do, exist among
the inferior races of the Continent. Let us thank Heaven, Sir, that
England never has been, and never will be, the right place for them!

Arrived at Nagle's Hotel, and finding nobody to inquire of in the hall,
Julius applied to the young lady who sat behind the window of "the
bar." The young lady was reading something so deeply interesting in the
evening newspaper that she never even heard him. Julius went into the
coffee-room.