Mrs. Sandford only smiled and said it would be difficult to go too far when there were so many poor people, and pretended to make a very good breakfast behind the tea-urn. After breakfast she lay down a little on the sofa, saying that it was the most ridiculous thing in the world to be so tired for nothing, and that she must have taken something that disagreed with her, for the stomach was at the bottom of everything when one grew old. It was still holiday time with John, and he insisted upon staying with her when grandfather went out for that daily walk which nothing short of death in the house would have made him leave off. John was unusually grave. He came and sat beside the sofa with a very perplexed countenance.
‘Grandmamma,’ he said, ‘I feel all mixed. I am so puzzled with remembering something. Remembering and forgetting. Wasn’t I somehow mixed up when I was a little chap with the name of May?’
CHAPTER VII.
COMRADES.
‘So we’ve got to leave off work, Jack. I don’t know how you may feel, but I don’t like it at all.’
This was what Elly Spencer said as she put her books together in Mr. Cattley’s study on a day in January not long before that on which the holidays, if they had been only holidays, would have come to an end. She was sixteen—a little younger than John Sandford, hitherto her constant companion and class-fellow. The relations between them were even more close than this, as the class consisted but of these two. Occasionally there had been a little emulation between them, even by times a keen prick of rivalry, but Mr. Cattley had made it very distinctly understood that, while John was more accurate in point of grammar and all the scaffolding of study, Elly was the one who caught the poetry or the meaning most quickly, and jumped at the signification of a sentence even when she did not know all the words of which it was composed. This was true to a certain extent, but not perhaps to the full length to which the curate carried it; but it had a very agreeable effect as between the two students, and carried off everything that might have been too sharp in their rivalry.
Thus Elly’s part was clearly defined, and so was John’s. If by chance the girl remembered a rule of construction before the boy on some exceptional occasion, or the boy perceived the sense of a passage before the girl, it made a laugh instead of any conflict of mutual jealousy.
‘Why, here’s Jack and Elly changing places,’ the curate would say, and no harm was done. The link between the two was, however, a very unusual one to exist between a boy and girl. They were like brother and sister, they were two comrades in the completest sense of the words, and yet they were something more. They were like each other’s second self in different conditions. Elly could not very well imagine what she would do were she Percy or Dick—who had strayed away from the habits of their home, into those of public schoolboys, members of a great corporation bound by other laws; but she thought she could quite imagine what she would do were she John, or Jack, as the young ones called him.
It did not indeed enter into Jack’s mind to realise what he should do were he Elly; for that is one inalienable peculiarity of the human constitution that no male creature can put himself in the place of a woman, as almost all female creatures imaginatively place themselves in that of some man. It is the one intimate mark of constitutional superiority which makes the meanest man more self-important than the noblest woman. Elly knew exactly what she would do if she were John. It was like herself going out into the world, planning the future, foreseeing all that was to happen. If it had been possible for her to go out into the world too, and have a profession, which with a sigh of regret she acknowledged was not possible, she would have done it just as he was going to do it. His enthusiasm about lighthouses had indeed been struck out by Elly, who had read all about the Eddystone ‘in a book,’ as she said, and who thenceforward had done nothing but talk about it till she became a bore to her brothers, and set John’s congenial soul aflame.
John and she talked between themselves about ‘the boys’ with a great deal of honest kindness, but perhaps just a little contempt—contempt is too hard, too unpleasant a word; but then toleration always implies this more or less. The boys got into scrapes: they thought of nothing but their shooting or their fishing: they were dreadfully bored on wet days, or when, as they said, there was ‘nothing to do.’
‘Jack and I can always find something to do,’ Elly said.