for feigning an interest
he could scarce have rejoicingly felt and that he yet somehow managed to
give a due impression of: that artifice being, as we must dimly have
divined at the time (in fact I make bold to say that I personally did
divine it,) exactly a sign of his _finesse_. Of no such uncanny engine
had Mr. Thompson, luckily, known a need--luckily since to what arsenal
could he possibly have resorted for it? None capable of supplying it
could ever have met his sight, and we ourselves should at a pinch have
had to help him toward it. He was easily interested, or at least took an
easy view, on such ground as we offered him, of what it was to be so;
whereas his successor attached to the condition a different value--one
recognising no secondary substitute. Perhaps this was why our connection
with M. Lerambert can have lasted but four or five months--time even for
his sharp subterfuge to have ceased entirely to serve him; though indeed
even as I say this I vaguely recall that our separation was attended
with friction, that it took him unaware and that he had been prepared
(or so represented himself) for further sacrifices. It could have been
no great one, assuredly, to deal with so intensely living a young mind
as my elder brother's, it could have been but a happy impression
constantly renewed; but we two juniors, Wilky and I, were a
drag--Wilky's powers most displayed at that time in his preference for
ingenuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, and my own aptitude
showing for nil, according to our poor gentleman's report of me when a
couple of months had sped, save as to rendering La Fontaine's fables
into English with a certain corresponding felicity of idiom. I remember
perfectly the parental communication to me of this fell judgment, I
remember as well the interest with which its so quite definite character
inspired me--that character had such beauty and distinctness; yet, and
ever so strangely, I recover no sense of having been crushed, and this
even though destitute, utterly, of any ground of appeal. The fact leaves
me at a loss, since I also remember my not having myself thought
particularly well, in the connection allowed, of my "rendering" faculty.
"Oh," I seem inwardly to have said, "if it were to be, if it only could
be, _really_ a question of rendering--!" and so, without confusion,
though in vague, very vague, mystification to have left it: as if so
many things, intrinsic and extrinsic, would have to