As to his mind, perhaps my own ideals had made me too exacting.  According to my carefully thought out plans, scholarship was to be Jerry’s buckler and defense against the old Adam.  God forbid that I should have planned, as Jack Ballard would have had it, to build Jerry in my own image, for if scholarship had been my own refuge it had also done something to destroy my touch with human kind.  It was the quality of sympathy in Jerry which I had lacked, the love for and confidence in every human being with whom he came into contact which endeared him to every person on the place.  From Radford to Christopher, throughout the house, stables and garage, down to the humblest hedge-trimmer, all loved Jerry and Jerry loved them all.  He had that kind of nature.  He couldn’t help loving those about him any more than he could help breathing, and yet it must not be supposed that the boy was lacking in discernment.  Our failings, weaknesses and foibles were a constant source of amusement to him, but his humor was without malice and his jibes were friendly, and he ran the gamut of my own exposed nerve pulps with such joyous consideration that I came to like the operation.  He loved me and I knew it.

But nothing could make him love his Latin grammar.  He worried through arithmetic and algebra and blarneyed his French and German tutors into making them believe he knew more than he did, but the purely scientific aspects of learning did not interest him.  It was only when he knew enough to read the great epics in the original that my patience had its reward.  The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid held him in thrall, and by some magic eliminated at a bound the purely mechanical difficulties which had fettered him.  Hector, Achilles, Agamemnon, Ulysses—­Jerry was each of these in turn, lacking only the opportunity to vanquish heroic foes or capture impregnable cities.

I had not censored the Homeric gods, as Jerry’s father had commanded, and my temerity led to difficulties.  It began with Calypso and Ulysses and did not even end when Dido was left alone upon the shores of Carthage.

“I don’t understand it at all,” he said one day with a wrinkled brow, “how a man of the caliber of Ulysses could stay so long the prisoner of Calypso, a woman, when he wanted to go home.  It’s a pretty shabby business for a hero and a demigod.  A woman!” he sneered, “I’d like to see any woman keep me sitting in a cave if I wanted to go anywhere!”

His braggadicio was the full-colored boyish reflection of the Canby point of view.  I had merely shrugged woman out of existence.  Now Jerry castigated her.

“What could she do?” he went on scornfully.  “She couldn’t shoot or run or fight.  All she did was to lie around or strut about with a veil around her head and a golden girdle (sensible costume!) and serve the hero with ambrosia and ruddy nectar.  I’ve never eaten ambrosia, but I’m pretty sure it was some sweet, sticky stuff, like her.”  There is no measure for the contempt of his accents.