What he would not permit this office to consist of was yet
to be settled: there was a queer relief, at all events--I mean
for myself in especial--in the renouncement of one pretension.
If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarce put it too
strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest
was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had
anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that,
by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried
out the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me
off straining to meet him on the ground of his true capacity.
He had at any rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it again;
as I had amply shown, moreover, when, on his joining me in
the schoolroom the previous night, I had uttered, on the subject
of the interval just concluded, neither challenge nor hint.
I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas.
Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them,
the accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me
by the beautiful little presence on which what had occurred
had as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.
To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I
decreed that my meals with the boy should be served,
as we called it, downstairs; so that I had been awaiting
him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside of the window
of which I had had from Mrs.
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