“Yes, till Madame Cleremont took my place.”
“I 'll not say it was the worst thing could have happened him. I wish it had been a woman had spoiled me. Eh, Eccles, possibly you may have some such misgivings yourself?”
“I was never corrupted,” said the other, with a sententious gravity whose hypocrisy was palpable.
I meditated many and many a time over these few words, and they suggested to me the first attempt I ever made to know something about myself and my own nature.
Those stories of Balzac's, those wonderful pictures of passionate life, acquired an immense hold upon me, from the very character of my own existence. That terrific game of temper against temper, mind against mind, and heart against heart, of which I read in these novels, I was daily witnessing in what went on around me, and I amused myself by giving the names of the characters in these fictions to the various persons of our society.
“It is a very naughty little world we live in at this house, Digby,” said Madame to me one day; “but you'd be surprised to find what a very vulgar thing is the life of people in general, and that if you want the sensational, or even the pictorial in existence, you 'll have to pay for it in some compromise of principle.”
“I know mamma wouldn't like to live here,” said I, half sullenly.
“Oh, mamma!” cried she, with a laugh, and then suddenly checking herself: “No, Digby, you are quite right. Mamma would be shocked at our doings; not that they are so very wicked in themselves as that, to one of her quiet ways, they would seem so.”
“Mamma is very good. I never knew any one like her,” stammered I out.
“That's quite true, my dear boy. She is all that you say, but one may be too good, just as he may be too generous or too confiding; and it is well to remember that there are a number of excellent things one would like to be if they could afford them; but the truth is, Digby, the most costly of all things are virtues.”