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But this one, Monsieur, she said in breathless reassurance,
has only one eye.
I would sooner talk to Antoinette than the tutorial staff of
Girton. If she woke up one morning and found she had a mind she
would think it a disease.
In the afternoon I strolled into Regent's Park and meeting the
McMurray's nineyearold son in charge of the housemaid, around
whom seemed to be hovering a sheepish individual in a bowler hat,
I took him off to the Zoological Gardens. On the way he told me,
with great glee, that his German governess was in bed with an
awful sore throat; that he wasn't doing any lessons; that the
sheepish hoverer was Milly's young man, and that the silly way
they went on was enough to make one sick. When he had fed
everything feedable and ridden everything ridable, I drove him to
the Wellington Road and deposited him with his parents. I love a
couple of hours with a child when it is thoroughly happy and on
its best behaviour. And the enjoyment is enhanced by the feeling
of utter thankfulness that he is not my child, but somebody
else's.
In the evening I read and meditated on the happiness of my lot.
The years of school drudgery have already lost their sharp edge
of remembered definition, and sometimes I wonder whether it is I
who lived through them. I had not a care in the world, not a
want that I could not gratify. I thought of Judith. I thought
of Sebastian Pasquale. I amused myself by seeking a Renaissance
type of which he must be the reincarnation. I fixed upon young
Olgiati, one of the assassins of Gian Galeazzo Sforza. Of the
many hundreds of British youths who passed before my eyes during
my slavery, he is the only one who has sought me out in his
manhood. And strange to say we had only a few months together,
during my first year's apprenticeship to the dismal craft, he
being in the sixth form, and but three or four years younger than
I. He was the maddest, oddest, most diabolical and most
unpopular boy in the school. The staff, to whom the conventional
must of necessity be always the Divine, loathed him. I alone
took to the creature. I think now that my quaint passion for the
cinquecento Italian must have had something to do with my
attraction. In externals he is as English as I am, having been
brought up in England by an English mother, but there are
thousands of Hindoos who are more British than he. The McMurrays
were telling me dreadful stories about him this afternoon.

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