when the boys would have the grace to go to bed.  My heart bled for him as I saw the reflection of my own pushing and pretentious youth, and I only desired that the curse should not fall upon him which has so often fallen upon myself, to recall ineffaceably, with a blush that still mantles my cheek in the silence and seclusion of my bedroom, in a wakeful hour, the thought of some such piece of transparent and ridiculous self-importance, shamefully uttered by myself, in a transport of ambitious vanity, long years ago.  How out of proportion to the offence is the avenging phantom of memory which dogs one through the years for such stupidities!  I remember that as a youthful undergraduate I went to stay in the house of an old family friend in the neighbourhood of Cambridge.  The only other male guest was a grim and crusty don, sharp and trenchant in speech, and with a determination to keep young men in their place.  At Cambridge he would have taken no notice whatever of me; but there, on alien ground, with some lurking impulse of far-off civility, he said to me when the ladies retired, “I am going to have a cigar; you know your way to the smoking-room?” I did not myself smoke in those days, so foolish was I and innocent; but recalling, I suppose, some similar remark made by an elderly and genial non-smoker under the same circumstances, I said pompously—­I can hardly bring myself even now to write the words—­“I don’t smoke, but I will come and sit with you for the pleasure of a talk.”  He gave a derisive snort, looked at me and said, “What! not allowed to smoke yet?  Pray don’t trouble to come on my account.”  It was not a genial speech, and it made me feel, as it was intended to do, insupportably silly.  I did not make matters better, I recollect, on the following day, when on returning to Cambridge I offered to carry his bag up from the station, for he insisted on walking.  He refused testily, and no doubt thought me, as in fact I was, a very spiritless young man.

I remember, too, another incident of the same kind, happening about the same time.  I was invited by a fellow-undergraduate to come to tea in his rooms, and to meet his people.  After tea, in the lightness of his heart, my friend performed some singular antics, such as standing on his head like a clown, and falling over the back of his sofa, alighting on his feet.  I, who would not have executed such gambols for the world in the presence of the fairer sex, but anxious in an elderly way to express my sympathy with the performer, said, with what was meant to be a polite admiration:  “I can’t think how you do that!” Upon which a shrewd and trenchant maiden-aunt who was present, and was delighting in the exuberance of her nephew, said to me briskly, “Mr. Benson, have you never been young?” I should be ashamed to say how often since I have arranged a neat repartee to that annoying question.  At the same time I think that the behaviour both of the don and the aunt was distinctly unjust and unadvisable.