"That I had learned a lot since you wanted him to tackle me on Virgil. But I like my work for all that; in fact, because of it. It is about the only kind of work in which one is learning every day; and I'm beginning to think that the real fun of life is not the knowledge of things so much as the getting to know them."
"Well, look 'ere, 'Enry. You're dragging your poor old father out into deep waters, an' you know he can't swim. You're talking like one of your articles. For I read 'em all that you mark with blue pencil, and your mother keeps 'em, even when she's hard up for paper to light the fire."
Henry wondered in his heart if, at a pinch, she would have used one for her curl-papers. He noticed just then, for the first time in his life, that the parlour of his old home was very small; the ceiling was so low that he found himself almost choking for breath when he looked up.
Dora and her mother were clearing away the tea-dishes, and Henry went upstairs to the bedroom where he would sleep with his father. The old nest had altered in a hundred ways, although none but Henry knew that. He had once been a bird of the brood here, but he had taken wings away, and to return for a fortnight once in two years was only to realise how far his wings had carried him. Henry had been born here, the people that he loved the best of all were still living here in the old home—his old home. Yet it could never be anything but his old home now. We talk about returning home; but really we never do so. Once we leave the home of our boyhood and youth, we never return again. It is seldom we wish to go back to the old life; and when the wish is there, Fate is usually against its fulfilment.
Henry Charles had certainly altered in a bewildering variety of ways since we first made his acquaintance. Then a tall, sallow youth of sixteen, ungainly in limb and not well-featured, his nose unshapely, his mouth too large, but a pair of dark eyes gleaming with spirit to light up the homeliness of the face. Now, a man—oh, the few short years, the tiny bridge across the chasm, the bridge we never pass again!—a man: tall as a dragoon, leggy, it is true, as the shrewd eye of his father had judged; but no longer thin to veritable lantern jaws, rather a promise of ample fleshing, and a nose that had sharpened itself into an organ not uncomely of outline. This changing of the nose is one of the most curious of our few tadpole resemblances. His mouth might still be large, but a glossy moustache hides many an anti-Cupid pair of lips, which a few passes of the razor would unmask to set the dear boy flying. Henry's hair was raven black and ample—perilously near to disaster for a hero. But we must have the truth in this narrative, cost what it may.
As he stood in the bedroom, brushing his hair and bending carefully to avoid knocking his head against the ceiling, which sloped steeply to the dormer window, where stood the looking-glass on its old mahogany table with the white linen cover, Henry presented the picture of a wholesome young Englishman, proud of brain rather than muscle, and differing therein from the ruck of his fellows, but joining hands with them again in the careful touch to his hair, the neat collar, the pretty necktie.
Now, the moment a young man begins to look to his neckties, unless he is a mere dude, there is a reason for it. Henry Charles was impossible miles from dudeism; ergo, there was a reason for his lingering at the looking-glass.
He had been slower than the average young man to awaken to the fact that for most male beings still unmated, there is some young lady deeply interested in his neckties and the cut of his coat. But he had awakened, and now the difficulty was to know which young lady: there seemed to be so many in Laysford who took an interest in the clever young assistant editor of the Leader. To be on the safe side, it was well to be observant of the sartorial conventions, even while in the inner recesses of the literary mind disdaining them.
That is Henry's state of mind when we see him after tea at the mirror in the camceiled bedroom. If it surprises you, remember that it is four years since you met him last, and many things can happen in that time. How do we know what has happened to him? His necktie tells us something, doesn't it?