-though I may be here at fault, and indeed can
scarce say on what arduous heights I supposed him, as a day-scholar, to
dwell. I took the unknown always easily for the magnificent and was sure
only of the limits of what I saw. It wasn't that the boys swarming for
us at school were not often, to my vision, unlimited, but that those
peopling our hours of ease, as I have already noted, were almost
inveterately so--they seemed to describe always, out of view, so much
larger circles. I linger thus on Edgar by reason of its having somehow
seemed to us that he described--was it at Doctor Anthon's?--the largest
of all. If there was a bigger place than Doctor Anthon's it was there he
would have been. I break down, as to the detail of the matter, in any
push toward vaster suppositions. But let me cease to stir this
imponderable dust.

XIX

I try at least to recover here, however, some closer notation of W. J.'s
aspects--yet only with the odd effect of my either quite losing him or
but apprehending him again at seated play with his pencil under the
lamp. When I see him he is intently, though summarily, rapidly drawing,
his head critically balanced and his eyebrows working, and when I don't
see him it is because I have resignedly relinquished him. I can't have
been often for him a deprecated, still less an actively rebuffed suitor,
because, as I say again, such aggressions were so little in order for
me; but I remember that on my once offering him my company in
conditions, those of some planned excursion, in which it wasn't desired,
his putting the question of our difference at rest, with the minimum of
explanation, by the responsible remark: "_I_ play with boys who curse
and swear!" I had sadly to recognise that I didn't, that I couldn't
pretend to have come to that yet--and truly, as I look back, either the
unadvisedness and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on all that
ground must have been complete (an interesting note on our general
manners after all,) or my personal failure to grasp must have been.
Besides which I wonder scarce less now than I wondered then in just what
company my brother's privilege was exercised; though if he had but
richly wished to be discouraging he quite succeeded. It wasn't that I
mightn't have been drawn to the boys in question, but that I simply
wasn't qualified. All boys, I rather found, were difficult to play
with--unless it was that they rather found _me_; but who would have been
so