own on
Riversley--I 'd betray my bosom friend. I'm regularly "hoist on my own
petard," as they say in the newspapers. I'm a curate and no mistake. You
did it with a turn of the wrist, without striking out: and I like neat
boxing. I bear no malice when I'm floored neatly.'

Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me
to tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his
overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and
a beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely. I
pushed it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with
suppressed fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other
Continental cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father's
society; and though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the
deuce, he was ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased
to covet. At every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was
alert to twist me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and
becoming liker to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them
for blockheads in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the
ingenuousness denied to seasoned men.

Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus
Temple's father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley.
Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded,
and in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity,
and the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain
well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own. He
confessed he had found me changed at first. His father, it appeared,
was working him as hard at Latin as Mr. Hart worked me, and he sat
down beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent
Cicero. I offered excuses for him to Mr. Hart, saying he would soon
prove himself the better scholar. 'There's my old Richie!' said Temple,
fondling me on the shoulder, and my nonsensical airs fell away from me
at once.

We roamed the neighbourhood talking old school-days over, visiting
houses, hunting and dancing, declaring every day we would write for
Heriot to join us, instead of which we wrote a valentine to Julia
Rippenger, and despatched a companion one composed in a very different
spirit to her father. Lady Ilchester did us the favour to draw a
sea-monster, an Andromeda, and a Perseu