An unguarded expression of these feelings of hers one evening at the Digbys' led to an offer from Stuart Digby to share his son's tutor with Ernest, that the two boys might prepare for Harvard together. Now, the idea of a tutor was almost as unpleasant to Miss Theodora as the thought of the undesirable acquaintances that Ernest might make at a public school. In the choice between unrepublican aristocracy and simple democracy she almost inclined to the latter; but Stuart Digby, her second cousin, had been John's bosom friend, and she could not bring herself to refuse the well-meant offer. It was Ernest who rebelled.
"I don't want to go to college at all. I hate Latin; I won't waste time on Greek. I detest that namby-pamby Ralph. All he cares for is to walk down Beacon Street with the girls. He don't know a force pump from a steam engine!"
But Miss Theodora, though tearful—for she hated to oppose him—was firm; and for three years the boy went down the Hill and across the Garden to recite his lessons with Ralph. Out of school he saw as little as he could of Ralph. His time was spent chiefly with Ben Bruce. Ben's father kept a small retail shop somewhere down near Court Street, and his family lived in a little house at the top of the hill,—a little house that never had been meant for any but people of limited means.
Yet from the roof of the house there was a view such as no one at the Back Bay ever dreamed of; for past the sloping streets near by one could gaze on the river bounded like a lake by marshy low lands and the high sea walls, which, with the distant hills, the nearer factory chimneys, even the gray walls of the neighboring County Jail, on a dark day or bright day, formed a beautiful scene.
There in that little room of Ben's Ernest often opened his heart to his friend more freely than to his aunt. Ben, considerably Ernest's senior, had entered the Institute of Technology—in boys' language, "Tech"—soon after Ernest himself had begun to study with Ralph's tutor, and Ernest frankly envied his friend's opportunity for studying science.
V.
In his boyish way Ernest enjoyed life. The Somersets, the Digbys and the rest made much of him, and at the Friday evening dancing class he was a favorite. Had he been a few years older the mothers might have objected to his popularity. A penniless boy attending the Friday evening dancing class is not old enough to be regarded as a dangerous detrimental, and he may receive the adoration, expressive though silent, of half a dozen little maids in white frocks and pink sashes, without encountering rebuffs from their mammas when he steps up to ask them to dance. In this respect fifteen has a great advantage over twenty, emphasized, too, by the fact that fifteen has not yet learned his own deficiency, while twenty is apt to be all too conscious of it.