"Then you'd better not marry at all," replied Lee. He reflected. "Don't tell your mamma what I've said."
This was before David went to school. Vivian and he were sent to a day-school in the neighbourhood after Miss Fewster turned the corner for the last time, and the elder child reported that "David was an awful little duffer in the playground." The authorities were not much more flattering about his mental attainments. The only high marks that he ever secured were in the composition-class, in which he generally got "double-six"—and was humbled if he didn't. For the rest, he was not ambitious. It was always "Harris" who brought home a prize bound in calf at the end of the term, though it was "Lee" who used to read it. "Harris" was popular, and conspicuous in the lower-school Eleven; "Lee" was a solitary, and usually went out with a "duck's egg." On the horizontal bar "Harris" was as good as many of the boys in trousers; "Lee" could barely manage to pull himself up to his chin.
He was just ten when he fell in love. She was a governess, who took some of the junior classes. Before he left in the evening he used to steal back into the silent schoolroom to say "good night" to her. He always found her standing at the wide window, looking out at the sunset, or the stars. She was still young enough to have her dreams—old enough to be weary. He never told her that he loved her, but she used to lend him her own books, and once she called him "David," and that day he walked up Belsize Park Gardens quivering with joy. Vivian said: "Can't you talk, fat-head?"—and he couldn't.
From the fly-leaves of the books he learnt that her name was Minnie. The knowledge was rapture; for a week he felt that he moved in a different world from the other boys, who only knew her as "Miss Pugh." Once she asked him if he was fond of poetry. He associated it with "Casabianca" and "The Collier's Dying Child," but he would not have sunk in her esteem for a whole holiday, and he said "Yes." So she lent him Tennyson—a shabby volume, with her favourite passages marked. The pencil-marks were very scholastic and precise, and the passages were very sad and sentimental. Poor Miss Pugh! The hardest duty of the governess was to discipline the woman. But David was too young to read the poetry in the margin.
And he was too young to understand the book, but parts of "Maud" he read again and again, and they throbbed in him. They translated what he felt while his father sang, and what the shadows were always hinting in the garden. It was as if he had been waiting for a chord, and it had come. The melody of sense intoxicated him. To put the garden into words, and make music at the same time—how wonderful! Not long afterwards a master discovered him poring dejectedly over original and precocious verse when he ought to have been engaged with declensions, and passed sentence, whereat the versifier gave way to tears.
"I don't like to see boys cry when they're punished, Lee; it isn't English!" said the Englishman, meaning that it wasn't brave.
David looked at him, aggrieved.
"I am crying," he explained, "because I couldn't say what I meant." But henceforth he spoiled his paper more guardedly.
When Vivian was thirteen, Ownie complained that he ought to be at a public school, instead of at Belsize Manor. It was "only right," she declared—"they owed him such advantages"—and Elisha, who had never refused her anything but men to flirt with, answered carelessly, "All right, my dear. Why didn't you say so before? Let him go to Eton or Harrow then, where the swells go. Send him to any place you like." The boy's own wish was to accompany one of his chums to a college on the south coast, and though Ownie parted reluctantly with the idea of Eton or Harrow where the swells went, she gave him his way in the end. She told the cook to see that his playbox was properly filled, and his stepfather presented him with a five-pound note. He made joyous adieux. David, it was understood, would follow him about two years later.
It was when the time came for David to proceed to the college that Vivian began to unburthen his mind to Ownie. The confidential period was not long-lived, but during that Easter recess they used to walk up and down the garden together, disparaging the man who kept them. In one of their conversations, the lad said impetuously: