He and Janet were staying at Riversley.  They left next morning, for the squire would not speak to him, nor I to Janet.

’I ’ll tell you what; there ‘s no doubt about one thing,’ said Charley; ’Janet’s right—­some of those girls are tremendously deep:  you’re about the cleverest fellow I’ve ever met in my life.  I thought of working into the squire in a sort of collateral manner, you know.  A cornetcy in the Dragoon Guards in a year or two.  I thought the squire might do that for me without much damaging you;—­perhaps a couple of hundred a year, just to reconcile me to a nose out of joint.  For, upon my honour, the squire spoke of making me his heir—­or words to that effect neatly conjugated—­ before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that Reverend Hart of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower biscuits to your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop down on Riversley—­I ’d betray my bosom friend.  I’m regularly “hoist on my own petard,” as they say in the newspapers.  I’m a curate and no mistake.  You did it with a turn of the wrist, without striking out:  and I like neat boxing.  I bear no malice when I’m floored neatly.’

Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his overthrow.  From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and a beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely.  I pushed it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with suppressed fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other Continental cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father’s society; and though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the deuce, he was ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased to covet.  At every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was alert to twist me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and becoming liker to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them for blockheads in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the ingenuousness denied to seasoned men.

Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus Temple’s father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley.  Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded, and in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity, and the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own.  He confessed he had found me changed at first.  His father, it appeared, was working him as hard at Latin as Mr. Hart worked me, and he sat down beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent Cicero.  I offered excuses for him to Mr. Hart, saying he would soon prove himself the better scholar.  ‘There’s my old Richie!’ said Temple, fondling me on the shoulder, and my nonsensical airs fell away from me at once.