“It is the dead weight of Brownlows, my dear. Only think! There’s another lot coming! A set of duplicates. They haven’t even the sense to vary the Christian names. Three more to be admitted to-morrow.”
“That accounts for a good deal!”
“You are laughing at me, Mary; but did you never know what it is to feel like Sisyphus? Whenever you think you have rolled it a little way, down it comes, a regular dead weight again, down the slope of utter indifference and dulness, till it seems to crush the very heart out of you!”
“Have you really nobody that is hopeful?”
“Nobody who does not regard me as his worst enemy, and treat all my approaches with distrust and hostility. Mary, how am I to live it down?”
“You speak as if it were a crime!”
“I feel as if it were one. Not of mine, but of the pedagogic race before me, who have spoilt the relations between man and boy; so that I cannot even get one to act as a medium.”
“That would be contrary to esprit de corps.”
“Exactly; and the worst of it is, I am not one of those genial fellows, half boys themselves, who can join in the sports con amore; I should only make a mountebank of myself if I tried, and the boys would distrust me the more.”
“Quite true. The only way is to be oneself, and one’s best self, and the rest will come.”