Would you kindly inform her, as exactly as possible, just what you propose to do with her son ?" The poor lady fixed her eyes appealingly on Rowland's face and seemed to say that Mr.Striker had spoken her desire, though she herself would have expressed it less defiantly.

But Rowland saw in Mr.Striker's many-wrinkled light blue eye, shrewd at once and good-natured, that he had no intention of defiance, and that he was simply pompous and conceited and sarcastically compassionate of any view of things in which Roderick Hudson was regarded in a serious light.
"Do, my dear madam ?" demanded Rowland.

"I don't propose to do anything.
He must do for himself.

I simply offer him the chance.

He 's to study, to work--hard, I hope." "Not too hard, please," murmured Mrs.Hudson, pleadingly, wheeling about from recent visions of dangerous leisure.