if it were not accompanied with
a sort of scorn for my past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life
appears to contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten
years' duration can be brought to memory to-day in some few phrases,
in which pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes
a philosophical reflection. Instead of feeling things, I weigh and
consider them----"

"You are as tiresome as the explanation of an amendment," cried Emile.

"Very likely," said Raphael submissively. "I spare you the first
seventeen years of my life for fear of abusing a listener's patience.
Till that time, like you and thousands of others, I had lived my life
at school or the lycee, with its imaginary troubles and genuine
happinesses, which are so pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded palates
still crave for that Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried it
afresh. It was a pleasant life, with the tasks that we thought so
contemptible, but which taught us application for all that...."

"Let the drama begin," said Emile, half-plaintively, half-comically.

"When I left school," Raphael went on, with a gesture that claimed the
right of speaking, "my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he
installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five in
the morning and be in bed by nine at night. He meant me to take my law
studies seriously. I attended the Schools, and read with an advocate
as well, but my lectures and work were so narrowly circumscribed by the
laws of time and space, and my father required such a strict account of
my doings, at dinner, that..."

"What is this to me?" asked Emile.

"The devil take you!" said Raphael. "How are you to enter into my
feelings if I do not relate the facts that insensibly shaped my
character, made me timid, and prolonged the period of youthful
simplicity? In this manner I cowered under as strict a despotism as a
monarch's till I came of age. To depict the tedium of my life, it will
be perhaps enough to portray my father to you. He was tall, thin, and
slight, with a hatchet face, and pale complexion; a man of few words,
fidgety as an old maid, exacting as a senior clerk. His paternal
solicitude hovered over my merriment and gleeful thoughts, and seemed to
cover them with a leaden pall. Any effusive demonstration on my part was
received by him as a childish absurdity. I was far more afraid of him
than I had been of any of our masters at school.

"I seem