w sad
it is that he should be so stupid!' She had never repeated that remark,
for the Doctor had raged like a wild bull, denouncing the brutal
bluntness of her mind, bemoaning his own fate to be so unequally mated
with an ass, and, what touched Anastasie more nearly, menacing the table
china by the fury of his gesticulations. But she adhered silently to her
opinion; and when Jean-Marie was sitting, stolid, blank, but not unhappy,
over his unfinished tasks, she would snatch her opportunity in the
Doctor's absence, go over to him, put her arms about his neck, lay her
cheek to his, and communicate her sympathy with his distress. 'Do not
mind,' she would say; 'I, too, am not at all clever, and I can assure you
that it makes no difference in life.'

The Doctor's view was naturally different. That gentleman never wearied
of the sound of his own voice, which was, to say the truth, agreeable
enough to hear. He now had a listener, who was not so cynically
indifferent as Anastasie, and who sometimes put him on his mettle by the
most relevant objections. Besides, was he not educating the boy? And
education, philosophers are agreed, is the most philosophical of duties.
What can be more heavenly to poor mankind than to have one's hobby grow
into a duty to the State? Then, indeed, do the ways of life become ways
of pleasantness. Never had the Doctor seen reason to be more content
with his endowments. Philosophy flowed smoothly from his lips. He was
so agile a dialectician that he could trace his nonsense, when
challenged, back to some root in sense, and prove it to be a sort of
flower upon his system. He slipped out of antinomies like a fish, and
left his disciple marvelling at the rabbi's depth.

Moreover, deep down in his heart the Doctor was disappointed with the ill-
success of his more formal education. A boy, chosen by so acute an
observer for his aptitude, and guided along the path of learning by so
philosophic an instructor, was bound, by the nature of the universe, to
make a more obvious and lasting advance. Now Jean-Marie was slow in all
things, impenetrable in others; and his power of forgetting was fully on
a level with his power to learn. Therefore the Doctor cherished his
peripatetic lectures, to which the boy attended, which he generally
appeared to enjoy, and by which he often profited.

Many and many were the talks they had together; and health and moderation
proved the subject of the Doctor's divaga