Like other subtle things, his position is hardly to be described but by negatives.  Above all, he is not demonstrative.  The days are long gone by when he said he wanted a bicycle, a top hat, and a pipe.  One or two of these things he has, and he takes them without the least swagger.  He avoids expression of any kind.  Any satisfaction he may feel with things as they are is rather to be surprised in his manner than perceived in his action.  Mr. Jaggers, when it befell him to be astonished, showed it by a stop of manner, for an indivisible moment—­not by a pause in the thing he chanced to be about.  In like manner the boy cannot prevent his most innocent pleasures from arresting him.

He will not endure (albeit he does not confess so much) to be told to do anything, at least in that citadel of his freedom, his home.  His elders probably give him as few orders as possible.  He will almost ingeniously evade any that are inevitably or thoughtlessly inflicted upon him, but if he does but succeed in only postponing his obedience, he has, visibly, done something for his own relief.  It is less convenient that he should hold mere questions, addressed to him in all good faith, as in some sort an attempt upon his liberty.

Questions about himself one might understand to be an outrage.  But it is against impersonal and indifferent questions also that the boy sets his face like a rock.  He has no ambition to give information on any point.  Older people may not dislike the opportunity, and there are even those who bring to pass questions of a trivial kind for the pleasure of answering them with animation.  This, the boy perhaps thinks, is “fuss,” and, if he has any passions, he has a passionate dislike of fuss.

When a younger child tears the boy’s scrapbook (which is conjectured, though not known, to be the dearest thing he has) he betrays no emotion; that was to be expected.  But when the stolen pages are rescued and put by for him, he abstains from taking an interest in the retrieval; he will do nothing to restore them.  To do so would mar the integrity of his reserve.  If he would do much rather than answer questions, he would suffer something rather than ask them.

He loves his father and a friend of his father’s, and he pushes them, in order to show it without compromising his temperament.

He is a partisan in silence.  It may be guessed that he is often occupied in comparing other people with his admired men.  Of this too he says little, except some brief word of allusion to what other men do not do.

When he speaks it is with a carefully shortened vocabulary.  As an author shuns monotony, so does the boy shun change.  He does not generally talk slang; his habitual words are the most usual of daily words made useful and appropriate by certain varieties of voice.  These express for him all that he will consent to communicate.  He reserves more by speaking dull words with zeal than by using zealous words that might betray him.  But his brevity is the chief thing; he has almost made an art of it.