“My aunts don’t like schools. They say boys learn to be tyrants and bullies at school.”
“Oh, do they? You couldn’t have fifty tyrants in one place, or they’d be the death of one another, like the Kilkenny cats.”
“My aunts say,” the boy continued, “that I’m to be a result. I won’t be a result. It’s beastly to be a result. I’ll be a policeman when I’m grown up. Just you wait. I’ll stand outside Parliament, and if a woman comes near I’ll carry her to jail. You see if I don’t.”
The boy spoke with such vindictive bitterness that the schoolmaster was shocked.
“I have no doubt,” he said soothingly, “that your aunts have good reasons for many of their views. You cannot possibly judge of such questions for many years to come.”
“You’d judge if you heard it all day long like I do,” the boy retorted. “It’s only here I get away from it. Here in this nice quiet with that fat, contented chap smiling at me; and now you’ve been and made me talk about it, so even he will know. You’ve gone and spoilt my place—it’s too bad.”
The boy looked as if he was really going to cry this time, and the schoolmaster felt dreadfully guilty.
“Tell me about your parents,” he said hastily. “Do you remember them?”
“My father died before I was born, and my mother just after—she always was very unwise.”
“My dear boy, you ought not to speak about your mother like that. You shock me.”