She seemed to me preternaturally anxious about Miss Penrhys.

My father listened in silence to my flippant satire on women’s letters.

He answered after a pause,

’Our Jorian says that women’s letters must be read like anagrams.  To put it familiarly, they are like a child’s field of hop-scotch.  You may have noticed the urchins at their game:  a bit of tile, and a variety of compartments to pass it through to the base, hopping.  Or no, Richie, pooh! ’tis an unworthy comparison, this hopscotch.  I mean, laddie, they write in zigzags; and so will you when your heart trumpets in your ear.  Tell her, tell that dear noble good woman—­say, we are happy, you and I, and alone, and shall be; and do me the favour—­she loves you, my son—­address her sometimes—­she has been it—­call her “mother”; she will like it she deserves—­nothing shall supplant her!’

He lost his voice.

She sent me three hundred pounds; she must have supposed the occasion pressing.  Thus fortified against paternal improvidence, I expended a hundred in the purchase of a horse, and staked the remainder on him in a match, and was beaten.  Disgusted with the horse, I sold him for half his purchase-money, and with that sum paid a bill to maintain my father’s credit in the town.  Figuratively speaking, I looked at my hands as astonished as I had been when the poor little rascal in the street snatched my cake, and gave me the vision of him gorging it in the flurried alley of the London crowd.

‘Money goes,’ I remarked.

‘That is the general experience of the nature of money,’ said my father freshly; ’but nevertheless you will be surprised to find how extraordinarily few are the people to make allowance for particular cases.  It plays the trick with everybody, and almost nobody lets it stand as a plea for the individual.  Here is Jorian, and you, my son, and perhaps your aunt Dorothy, and upon my word, I think I have numbered all I know—­or, ay, Sukey Sampleman, I should not omit her in an honourable list—­and that makes positively all I know who would commiserate a man touched on the shoulder by a sheriff’s officer—­not that such an indignity is any longer done to me.’

‘I hope we have seen the last of Shylock’s great-grandnephew,’ said I emphatically.

’Merely to give you the instance, Richie.  Ay!  I hope so, I hope so!  But it is the nature of money that you never can tell if the boarding’s sound, once be dependent upon it.  But this is talk for tradesmen.’  Thinking it so myself, I had not attempted to discover the source of my father’s income.  Such as it was, it was paid half-yearly, and spent within a month of the receipt, for the most signal proof possible of its shameful insufficiency.  Thus ten months of the year at least he lived protesting, and many with him, compulsorily.  For two months he was a brilliant man.  I penetrated his mystery enough to abstain from questioning him, and enough to determine that on my coming of age he should cease to be a pensioner, petitioner, and adventurer.  He aimed at a manifest absurdity.