Chapter 5 - Page 2

said Mr. Lewisham. "Oh!--_damn_!"--a most objectionable
expression and rare with him in those days. He had half a mind to
follow the head-master and ask him if he doubted his word. It was only
too evident what the answer would be.

He stood for a minute undecided, then turned on his heel and marched
homeward with savage steps. His muscles quivered as he walked, and his
face twitched. The tumult of his mind settled at last into angry
indignation.

"Confound him!" said Mr. Lewisham, arguing the matter out with the
bedroom furniture. "Why the _devil_ can't he mind his own business?"

"Mind your own business, sir!" shouted Mr. Lewisham at the wash-hand
stand. "Confound you, sir, mind your own business!"

The wash-hand stand did.

"You overrate your power, sir," said Mr. Lewisham, a little
mollified. "Understand me! I am my own master out of school."

Nevertheless, for four days and some hours after Mr. Bonover's Hint,
Mr. Lewisham so far observed its implications as to abandon open-air
study and struggle with diminishing success to observe the spirit as
well as the letter of his time-table prescriptions. For the most part
he fretted at accumulating tasks, did them with slipshod energy or
looked out of window. The Career constituent insisted that to meet and
talk to this girl again meant reproof, worry, interference with his
work for his matriculation, the destruction of all "Discipline," and
he saw the entire justice of the insistence. It was nonsense this
being in love; there wasn't such a thing as love outside of trashy
novelettes. And forthwith his mind went off at a tangent to her eyes
under the shadow of her hat brim, and had to be lugged back by main
force. On Thursday when he was returning from school he saw her far
away down the street, and hurried in to avoid her, looking
ostentatiously in the opposite direction. But that was a
turning-point. Shame overtook him. On Friday his belief in love was
warm and living again, and his heart full of remorse for laggard days.

On Saturday morning his preoccupation with her was so vivid that it
distracted him even while he was teaching that most teachable subject,
algebra, and by the end of the school hours the issue was decided and
the Career in headlong rout. That afternoon he would go, whatever
happened, and see her and speak to her again. The thought of Bonover
arose only to be dismissed. And besides--

Bonover took a siesta early in the afternoon.

Yes, he would go out and find her and speak to her. Nothing should
stop him.

Once that decision was taken his imagination became riotous with
things he might say, attitudes he might strike,