It was a pitiful surrender to agitation,
but my being aware of this had somehow no power to restore me.
I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my little
friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning;
by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced,
for absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils
and the rest of the congregation such an example of delay.
What I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something
out of me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this
awkward collapse. He had got out of me that there was something
I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make
use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom.
My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable question
of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was
really but the question of the horrors gathered behind.
That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things
was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have
desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness
and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived
from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure,
was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me:
"Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this
interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me
to lead with you a life that's so unnatural for a boy.
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