a supper of bread and milk, at eight o’clock.
School-life, on experiment, seemed hostile to these
observances, and Eugene was taken home again, to be
moulded into urbanity beneath the parental eye.
A tutor was provided for him, and a single select
companion was prescribed. The choice, mysteriously,
fell on me, born as I was under quite another star;
my parents were appealed to, and I was allowed for
a few months to have my lessons with Eugene.
The tutor, I think, must have been rather a snob, for
Eugene was treated like a prince, while I got all
the questions and the raps with the ruler. And
yet I remember never being jealous of my happier comrade,
and striking up, for the time, one of those friendships
of childhood. He had a watch and a pony and
a great store of picture-books, but my envy of these
luxuries was tempered by a vague compassion which left
me free to be generous. I could go out to play
alone, I could button my jacket myself, and sit up
till I was sleepy. Poor Pickering could never
take a step without asking leave, or spend half an
hour in the garden without a formal report of it when
he came in. My parents, who had no desire to
see me inoculated with importunate virtues, sent me
back to school at the end of six months. After
that I never saw Eugene. His father went to
live in the country, to protect the lad’s morals,
and Eugene faded, in reminiscence, into a pale image
of the depressing effects of education. I think
I vaguely supposed that he would melt into thin air,
and indeed began gradually to doubt of his existence,
and to regard him as one of the foolish things one
ceased to believe in as one grew older. It seemed
natural that I should have no more news of him.
Our present meeting was my first assurance that he
had really survived all that muffling and coddling.
I observed him now with a good deal of interest, for
he was a rare phenomenon—the fruit of a
system persistently and uninterruptedly applied.
He struck me, in a fashion, as certain young monks
I had seen in Italy; he had the same candid, unsophisticated
cloister face. His education had been really
almost monastic. It had found him evidently a
very compliant, yielding subject; his gentle affectionate
spirit was not one of those that need to be broken.
It had bequeathed him, now that he stood on the threshold
of the great world, an extraordinary freshness of
impression and alertness of desire, and I confess that,
as I looked at him and met his transparent blue eye,
I trembled for the unwarned innocence of such a soul.
I became aware, gradually, that the world had already
wrought a certain work upon him and roused him to a
restless, troubled self-consciousness. Everything
about him pointed to an experience from which he had
been debarred; his whole organism trembled with a
dawning sense of unsuspected possibilities of feeling.
This appealing tremor was indeed outwardly visible.
He kept shifting himself about on the grass, thrusting
his hands through his hair, wiping a light perspiration
from his forehead, breaking out to say something and
rushing off to something else. Our sudden meeting
had greatly excited him, and I saw that I was likely
to profit by a certain overflow of sentimental fermentation.
I could do so with a good conscience, for all this
trepidation filled me with a great friendliness.