‘Because you can work. I hate the very sight of a book. I am afraid I shall be plucked. I see nothing else for it. And what will the old man say? I have grace enough left to be sorry for him. But he will take it out in sour looks and silences.’
‘There’s time enough yet. I wish you were not so far ahead of me: we might have worked together.’
‘I can’t work, I tell you. I hate it. It will console my father, I hope, to find his prophecies concerning me come true. I’ve heard him abuse me to my mother.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t talk so of your father, Charley. It’s not like you. I can’t bear to hear it.’
‘It’s not like what I used to be, Wilfrid. But there’s none of that left. What do you take me for—honestly now?’
He hung his head low, his eyes fixed on the hearth-rug, not on the fire, and kept gnawing at the head of his cane.
‘I don’t like some of your companions,’ I said. ‘To be sure I don’t know much of them.’
‘The less you know, the better! If there be a devil, that fellow. Brotherton will hand me over to him—bodily, before long.’
‘Why don’t you give him up?’ said I.
‘It’s no use trying. He’s got such a hold of me. Never let a man you don’t know to the marrow pay even a toll-gate for you, Wilfrid.’