boys; he is not exactly disagreeable, but he derides
all boys who are in the least degree shy, stupid,
or unconventional. He is quite a little man of
the world, in fact. Well, I don’t like that
type of creature, and I tried to indicate to the father
that I thought the boy was rather on the wrong lines.
He heard me with impatience, as though I was bothering
him about matters which belonged to my province; and
he ended by laughing, not very agreeably, and saying:
“Well, you don’t seem to have much of
a case against Charlie; he appears to be fairly popular.
I confess that I don’t much go in for sentiment
in education; if a boy does his work, and plays his
games, and doesn’t get into trouble, I think
he is on the right lines.” And then he
paid me an offensive compliment: “I hear
you make the boys very comfortable, and I am sure
I am obliged to you for taking so much interest in
him.” He then went off for a little to see
the boy. He appeared at dinner, and I had invited
two or three of the most intelligent of my colleagues.
Mr. Welbore simply showed off. He told stories;
he made mirthless legal jokes. One of my colleagues,
Patrick, a man of some originality, ventured to dispute
an opinion of Mr. Welbore’s, and Mr. Welbore
turned him inside out, by a series of questions, as
if he was examining a witness, in a good-natured,
insolent way, and ended by saying: “Well,
Mr. Patrick, that sort of thing wouldn’t do
in a law-court, you know; you would have to know your
subject better than that.” I was not surprised,
after dinner, at the alacrity with which my colleagues
quitted the scene, on all sorts of professional excuses.
Then Mr. Welbore sate up till midnight, smoking strong
cigars, and giving me his ideas on the subject of
education. That was a bitter pill, for he worsted
me in every argument I undertook.
Sunday was a nightmare day; every spare moment was
given up to Mr. Welbore. I breakfasted with him,
took him to chapel, took him to the boys’ luncheon,
walked with him, sate with him, talked with him.
The strain was awful. The man sees everything
from a different point of view to my own. One
ought to be able to put up with that, of course, and
I don’t at all pretend that I consider my point
of view better than his; but I had to endure the consciousness
that he thought his own point of view in all respects
superior to mine. He thought me a slow-coach,
an old maid, a sentimentalist; and I had, too, the
galling feeling that on the whole he approved of a
drudge like myself taking a rather priggish point
of view, and that he did not expect a schoolmaster
to be a man of the world, any more than he would have
expected a curate or a gardener to be. I felt
that the man was in his way a worse prig even than
I was, and even more of a Pharisee, because he judged
everything by a certain conventional standard.
His idea of life was a place where you found out what
was the right thing to do; and that if you did that,
money and consideration, the only two things worth