"Yes, sir," says Geoffrey.
"Your father's French, I suppose?"
"I dare say, sir," says Geoffrey.
"Ah, I thought so!"
All of which was very unfair to Barty, whose Latin, like that of most boys who have been brought up at a French school, was probably quite as good as the English school‑master's own, except for its innocence of quantities; and Blanchet and Legendre are easier to learn than Euclid, and stick longer in the memory; and Barty remembered well.
Then, besides the many friends who came to the pleasant house to stay, or else for lunch or tea or dinner, there were pious pilgrims from all parts of the world, as to a shrine—from Paris, from Germany, Italy, Norway, and Sweden; from America especially. Leah had to play the hostess almost every day of her life, and show off her lion and make him roar and wag his tail and stand on his hind legs—a lion that was not always in the mood to tumble and be shown off, unless the pilgrims were pretty and of the female sex.
Barty was a man's man par excellence, and loved to forgather with men. The only men he couldn't stand were those we have agreed to call in modern English the Philistines and the prigs—or both combined, as they can sometimes be; and this objection of his would have considerably narrowed his circle of male acquaintances but that the Philistines and the prigs, who so detest each other, were so dotingly fond of Barty, and ran him to earth in Marsfield.
The Philistines loved him for his world‑wide popularity; the prigs in spite of it! They loved him for himself alone—because they couldn't help it, I suppose—and lamented over him as over a fallen angel.
He was happiest of all with the good denizens of Bohemia, who have known want and temptation and come unscathed out of the fire, but with their affectations and insincerities and conventionalities all burnt away.
Good old Bohemia—alma mater dolorosa; stern old gray she‑wolf with the dry teats—marâtre au cœur de pierre! It is not a bad school in which to graduate, if you can do so without loss of principle or sacrifice of the delicate bloom of honor and self‑respect.