During the winter the study of languages was commonly uppermost; in summer sketching was more favoured.
I do think sketching brings one a larger amount of pleasure than almost any other occupation. And like “collecting,” it is a very sociable pursuit when one has fellow-sketchers as well as fellow-naturalists. And this, I must confess, is a merit in my eyes, I being of a sociable disposition! Eleanor could live alone, I think, and be happy; but I depend largely on my fellow-creatures.
Jack and I were talking rather sentimentally the other day about “old times,” and I said:
“How jolly it was, that summer we used to sketch so much—all four of us together!”
And Jack, who was rubbing some new stuff of his own compounding into his fishing-boots, replied:
“Awfully. I vote we take to it again when the weather’s warmer.”
But Jack is so sympathetic, he will agree with anything one says. Indeed, I am sure that he feels what one feels—for the time, at any rate.
Clement is very different. He always disputes and often snubs what one says; partly, I am sure, from a love of truth—a genuine desire to keep himself and everybody else from talking in an unreal way, and from repeating common ideas without thinking them out at first hand; and partly, too, from what Keziah calls the “contradictiousness” of his temper. He was in the room when Jack and I were talking, but he was not talking with us. He was reading for his examination.
All the Arkwrights can work through noise and in company, having considerable powers of mental abstraction. I think they even sometimes combine attention to their own work with an occasional skimming of the topics current in the room as well.
Some outlying feeler of Clement’s brain caught my remark and Jack’s reply.