“It would be wrong in me to pretend ignorance,” I said, “of what you mean. I know all about it.”
“Do you? He has been to you, has he? But you don’t know all about it, sir. The impudence of the young rascal!”
He paused for a moment.
“A man like me!” he resumed, becoming eloquent in his indignation, and, as I thought afterwards, entirely justifying what Wordsworth says about the language of the so-called uneducated,—“A man like me, who was as proud of his honour as any aristocrat in the country—prouder than any of them would grant me the right to be!”
“Too proud of it, I think—not too careful of it,” I said. But I was thankful he did not heed me, for the speech would only have irritated him. He went on.
“Me to be treated like this! One child a ...”
Here came a terrible break in his speech. But he tried again.
“And the other a ...”
Instead of finishing the sentence, however, he drove his plough fiercely through the groove, splitting off some inches of the wall of it at the end.
“If any one has treated you so,” I said, “it must be the devil, not God.”