He waved his hand—a pale hand with veined, thin, nervous fingers, which she looked at in its foreign gesture. “Too much importance is attached to languages,” he declared. “It is the cheapest and most trivial of acquirements, if it stands alone, or if it is not put to high uses. Parents have so often angered me over this: they do not care what is in their children’s minds and hearts, but only for the polish and form of what is on their tongues. I have a different feeling about education.”
She nodded again, and laid the book aside. “You are coming to a country where everything will shock you, then,” she said. “I would rather do scullery work, or break stones by the roadside, than be a schoolteacher in England.”
“Oh, it’s the same everywhere,” he urged. “I would not think that the English were worse than the others. They are different, that is all. Besides, I do not think I shall be a teacher in England. Of course, I speak in the dark; for a few hours yet everything is uncertain. But as the old American senator at Monte Carlo used to say, ‘I feel it in my bones’ that I will not have to teach any more.”
The expression of her face seemed somehow not to invite autobiography at the moment. “The prospect of not having to work any more for one’s living,” she mused at him—“how curiously fascinating it always is! We know perfectly well that it is good for us to work, and that we should be woefully unhappy if we did not work, and yet we are forever charming our imagination with a vision of complete idleness.”
“I would not be idle!” the young man broke forth, enthusiastically. He leaned forward in his seat, and spoke with eager hands as well as words against the noise that filled the swaying carriage. “I have that same feeling—the longing to escape from the dull and foolish tasks I have to do—but I never say to myself that I would be idle. There are such a host of things to do in the world that are worth doing! But the men who have the time and the money, who are in the position to do these things—how is it, I ask myself, that they never think of doing them? It is the greatest of marvels to me. Then sometimes I wonder, if the chance and the power came to me, whether I also would sit down, and fold my hands, and do nothing. It is hard to say; who can be sure what is in him till he has been tested? Yet I like to think that I would prove the exception. It is only natural,” he concluded, smilingly, “that one should try to think as well as possible of oneself.”
The young lady surveyed his nervous, mobile face with thoughtful impassivity. “You seem to think, one way or another, a good deal about yourself,” she remarked.
He bowed to her, with a certain exaggeration in his show of quite sincere humility which, she said to herself, had not been learned from his English-speaking connections.
“What you say is very true,” he admitted with candor. “It is my fault—my failing. I know it only too well.”
“My fault is bad manners,” she replied, disarmed by his self-abasement. “I had no business to say it at all.”
“Oh, no,” he urged. “It is delightful to me that you did say it. I could not begin to tell you how good your words sounded in my ears. Honest and wise criticism is what I have not heard before in years. You do not get it in the South; there is flattery for you, and sneering, and praise as much too high as blame is too cruel—but no candid, quiet judgments. Oh, I loved to hear you say that! It was like my brother—my older brother Salvator. He is in America now. He is the only one who always said the truth to me. And I am glad, too, because—because it makes you seem like a friend to me, and I have been so agitated this whole week, so anxious and upset, and all without a soul to talk to, or advise with—and the pressure on me has been so great——”