an absolute lack of the instinct of justice.  He’s of the real feminine turn—­I believe I have written it before—­without the redeeming fidelity of the sex.  I honestly believe that I might come into his study in my night-shirt and he would smile at it as a picturesque deshabille.  But for poor Theodore to-night there was nothing but scowls and frowns, and barely a civil inquiry about his health.  But poor Theodore is not such a fool, either; he will not die of a snubbing; I never said he was a weakling.  Once he fairly saw from what quarter the wind blew, he bore the master’s brutality with the utmost coolness and gallantry.  Can it be that Mr. Sloane really wishes to drop him?  The delicious old brute!  He understands favor and friendship only as a selfish rapture—­a reaction, an infatuation, an act of aggressive, exclusive patronage.  It’s not a bestowal, with him, but a transfer, and half his pleasure in causing his sun to shine is that—­being wofully near its setting—­it will produce certain long fantastic shadows.  He wants to cast my shadow, I suppose, over Theodore; but fortunately I am not altogether an opaque body.  Since Theodore was taken ill he has been into his room but once, and has sent him none but a dry little message or two.  I, too, have been much less attentive than I should have wished to be; but my time has not been my own.  It has been, every moment of it, at the disposal of my host.  He actually runs after me; he devours me; he makes a fool of himself, and is trying hard to make one of me.  I find that he will bear—­that, in fact, he actually enjoys—­a sort of unexpected contradiction.  He likes anything that will tickle his fancy, give an unusual tone to our relations, remind him of certain historical characters whom he thinks he resembles.  I have stepped into Theodore’s shoes, and done—­with what I feel in my bones to be very inferior skill and taste—­all the reading, writing, condensing, transcribing and advising that he has been accustomed to do.  I have driven with the bonhomme; played chess and cribbage with him; beaten him, bullied him, contradicted him; forced him into going out on the water under my charge.  Who shall say, after this, that I haven’t done my best to discourage his advances, put myself in a bad light?  As yet, my efforts are vain; in fact they quite turn to my own confusion.  Mr. Sloane is so thankful at having escaped from the lake with his life that he looks upon me as a preserver and protector.  Confound it all; it’s a bore!  But one thing is certain, it can’t last forever.  Admit that he has cast Theodore out and taken me in.  He will speedily discover that he has made a pretty mess of it, and that he had much better have left well enough alone.  He likes my reading and writing now, but in a month he will begin to hate them.  He will miss Theodore’s better temper and better knowledge—­his healthy impersonal judgment.  What an advantage that well-regulated youth has over me, after all!  I am for days, he is for years; he for the long run, I for the short.  I, perhaps, am intended for success, but he is adapted for happiness.  He has in his heart a tiny sacred particle which leavens his whole being and keeps it pure and sound—­a faculty of admiration and respect.  For him human nature is still a wonder and a mystery; it bears a divine stamp—­Mr. Sloane’s tawdry composition as well as the rest.