“No, sir,” said I, in the same cautious tone.
“I 'll show you the moves, when this party is over.” And I muttered my thanks for the courtesy.
“This is intolerable!” cried out my father. “That confounded whispering is far more distracting than any noise. I have lost all count of my game. I say, Eccles, why is not that boy in bed?”
“I thought you said he might sup, Sir Roger.”
“If I did, it was because I thought he knew how to conduct himself. Take him away at once.”
And Eccles rose, and with more kindness than I had expected from him, said, “Come, Digby, I 'll go too, for we have both to be early risers to-morrow.”
Thus ended my first day in public, and I have no need to say what a strange conflict filled my head that night as I dropped off to sleep.
CHAPTER VI. HOW THE DAYS WENT OYER
If I give one day of my life, I give, with very nearly exactness, the unbroken course of my existence. I rose very early—hours ere the rest of the household was stirring—to work at my lessons, which Mr. Eccles apportioned for me with a liberality that showed he had the highest opinion of my abilities, or—as I discovered later on to be the truth—a profound indifference about them. Thus, a hundred lines of Virgil, thirty of Xenophon, three propositions of Euclid, with a sufficient amount of history, geography, and logic, would be an ordinary day's work. It is fair I should own that when the time of examination came, I found him usually imbibing seltzer and curacoa, with a wet towel round his head; or, in his robuster moments, practising the dumbbells to develop his muscles. So that the interrogatories-were generally in this wise:—