"Well, perhaps, if he has time. But I have a much better proposal to make
than that. My idea is that we should bring him up to be a miner."

"I thought children under twenty-one always were."

"Not minor, silly--miner."

"Well, what's the difference? Saying it twice doesn't help. And neither
does shouting," she added.

Gerald wrote it down.

"Oh, I _see_. But why?"

"Because then he can earn enough money to keep us all comfortably--us in
idle dependence at Chelsea, him in idle independence at Merthyr-Tydfil or
wherever one mines."

"He might send us diamonds now and then too. Or perhaps it isn't allowed."

"No, no. He'll be a coal-miner, naturally."

Margaret pondered this for some minutes.

"No, I don't think much of your idea," she said finally. "Very likely coal
will have gone out of fashion by then and we shall all be warming ourselves
with Cape gooseberries or pine-kernels or something. I think he ought to be
taught _all_ kinds of mining--diamond-mining, salt-mining, gold-mining and
undermining at Lloyd's. Then be could take up whatever was most profitable