“I should like to see you try it”—the words slipped out almost involuntarily. “It’s no use—I can’t bear vanity and boasting.”
“At once,” replied the dauntless youth. And action succeeded words. He took a piece of paper and a pencil, and quickly traced the cabalistic figure.
“As for demonstrations,” he began, “there are plenty to choose from. Is it all the same to you which I take?”
“Yes,” I replied mechanically. In fact it had to be all the same to me. If there had been a hundred demonstrations I should not have known one from the other.
“Then we’ll take the most usual one,” my mathematician went on; and proceeded to produce the lines which Professor Roveni, of respected memory, had made me produce twenty-seven years before, and, with the accents of the sincerest conviction, prepared to prove to me that the triangle BAC was equal to the triangle NAF, and so on.
“And now,” said my son, when he had finished, “we can, if you wish, arrive at the same conclusion in another way.”
“For pity’s sake!” I exclaimed in terror, “since we have reached the journey’s end, let us rest.”
“But I am not tired.”
Not even tired! Was the boy an embryo Newton? And yet people talk about the principle of heredity!
“I suppose you are at the top of your class in mathematics,” I said, not untouched by a certain reverential awe.