But before I had quite finished "doing my hair"—as the ladies express it, and mine very often took almost as long as a lady's to do, because of there being so much of it,—Sir Roland came thumping my dressing-room door, and with his usual impetuosity, rushed in.
"Tommy, shake hands, like a man," he exclaimed, "or I'll pull all your hair out of trim again. You cut up, as rough as a clinker, last night; the first time I ever saw you out of temper. However, a new hope sprang up in my breast. Do you know what you did, as you went along the passage?"
"No. I remember nothing, except that I said to myself—'I am not a machine, and I won't be treated as a machine. If he only wants me as a Jack in the box——'"
"A Tommy in the box, you mean. No, no. You must lay aside all those small ideas. It is not I that want you, it is your Country, your noble, but outraged Fatherland. Those are the sentiments that should exalt you, instead of petty wrath against your ancient friend. But I see a new provision in the laws of gravitation—which Panclast will bring in a bill to abolish, before we are very much older. In your anger, you tried to stride loftily, as behoves the most illustrious of all coxswains; but instead of so doing, you never touched the ground! You flitted, without any coarse agency of legs; like the ghost of Achilles, at the great deeds of his son."
"Well, I thought there was something unusual about it," I answered, without any heroism; "but my mind was so occupied with its wrongs, that I never noticed how I walked."
"That is another most excellent sign. Temporary absence of perception. The main point will be, to enlarge the indignation—to ennoble it, to make it national, instead of individual. Your course of reading at Oxford—even though you read nothing there at all, except novels—has produced, in your system, a fundamental change. In your early days, exhilaration carried you over the heads of the public. You have seen too much of the world by this time, to be exhilarated any more. Joy can no more elevate you; and Nature (rejoicing as she does in exceptions) has found a fresh way, to keep you in the list. But a perilous turn of the balance for you, I am sadly afraid, dear Tommy. Joy is not frequent, even in the days of boyhood. But indignation—oh, Tommy, Tommy, what a lot of lead pipe you must carry round you, if you once become liable to leave the earth, every time you see wrong being done upon it!"
"Clear out," said I; "I want to finish dressing, and not to be plagued with immoral reflections. If you want to spare me all that lead pipe, regulate your own conduct first, by the lofty standard you want to bring me up to. That little business about Toggins, for instance, might force me to put on a pound or two; though a lily-white act, in comparison with the things you do at election-time."
To enter into that matter did not suit him, while in his present fine vein of morality; so that he only made a face—being still a boy, as much as I was—then he pulled in his tongue, and tapped his lips, and said,
"Not a word about that, to the Professor, mind. I have boasted to him, about the purity of everything; and he has promised to come and be gratified. And gratified he shall be, by everything that is noble. Now look alive! I shall have a busy day to-day. I mean to go canvassing, though of course I need not do it. But I am sure, that the women would be angry, if I didn't; and with this clash of changes coming, it is not only wise, but necessary, to keep them on our side, as they are by nature. If nothing else showed the Conservative cause to be the true one, it would be enough that the women always take to it."
With this, which moved me a great deal more than the rest of his arguments put together, he set off to shave himself, which he insisted upon doing, now and then, with a competent eye to the future. And no sooner was he gone, than I set to, to get everything about me into the proper place, that I might not be taken, at breakfast-time, for a young man at all of a Radical turn.