“I’m able”, I said stubbornly, “I can go on all night if you please me, so we should skip appetizers.”
“No, no!” she replied, laughing, “let us have a banquet then, but begin with lips and tongue!”
The delay, the bandying to and fro of argument and above all, the idea of kissing and tonguing her sex, had brought me to coolness and reason. Was I not just as foolish as Bancroft if I yielded to the—an unknown girl.
I replied finally, “No, little lady, your charms are not for me”, and I took my seat again at the table and poured myself out some wine. I had the ordinary American or English youth’s repugnance to what seemed like degradation, never guessing that Jeanne was giving me the second lesson in the noble art of seduction, of which my sister had taught me long ago the rudiments.
The next time I was offered minette, I had grown wiser and made no scruples; but that’s another story. The fact is that in my first visit to Paris I kept perfectly chaste, thanks in part to the example of Ned’s blunder; thanks, too, to my dislike of going with any girl sexually whom I didn’t really care for, and I didn’t care for Jeanne: she was too imperious and imperiousness in a girl is the quality I most dislike, perhaps because I suffer from an overdose of the humor. At any rate, it was not sexual indulgence that broke my health in Paris; but my passionate desire to learn that had cut down my hours of sleep and exasperated my nerves: I took cold and had a dreadful recurrence of malaria. I wanted rest and time to take breath and think.
The little house in a side-street in the lovely Welsh watering-place was exactly the haven of rest I needed. I soon got well and strong and for the first time learned to know my father. He came for long walks with me, though he was over sixty. After his terrible accident seven years before (he slipped and fell thirty feet into a dry-dock while his ship was being repaired), one side of his hair and moustache had turned white while the other remained jet black. I was astonished first by his vigor: he thought nothing of a ten-mile walk and on one of our excursions I asked him why he had not given me the nomination I wanted as midshipman.
He was curiously silent and waved the subject aside with: “The Navy for you? No!” and he shook his head. A few days afterwards, however, he came back to the subject of his own accord.
“You asked me”, he began, “why I didn’t send you the nomination for the midshipman’s examination. Now I’ll tell you. To get on in the British Navy and make a career in it, you should either be well-born or well-off: you were neither. For a youth without position or money, there are only two possible roads up: servility or silence, and you were incapable of both.”
“Oh, Governor, how true and how wise of you!” I cried, “but why, why didn’t you tell me? I’d have understood then as well as now and thought the more of you for thwarting me.”
“You forget”, he went on, “that I had trained myself in the other road of silence: it is difficult for me even now to express myself”, and he went on with bitterness in voice and accent: