The Patient Observer and His Friends

The family had just left town for the summer and the house was fearfully empty. I sat there, smoking a cigarette amid the first traces of domestic uncleanliness, when I heard him on the sta

pon my own hat, which was lying on the armchair, on top of several July magazines. I had put my hat down on the

tuation. But, as I look at Philip, I cannot help feeling that his fine colour and the sparkle in his blue eyes and his full count of nineteen years make the situation far less desperate than he portrays it. Philip is not a handsome lad, but he will be a year from now. At present he is mostly hands and feet, and his face shows a marked nasal developme

constant mouthing of the pipe. I, too, smoke, and I am not foolish enough to risk my standing with Philip by preaching where I do not practise. Besides, I observe that the boy

rofane without discrimination. His supply of unobjectionable adjectives would be insufficient to meet the needs of the ordinary kindergarten conversation. He uses the same swift epithet to describe certain brands of t

as of satire. It can understand being petted and it can understand being whipped; but the sting behind the smile, the lash beneath the caress, throws the young soul into helpless panic. It feels itself baited and knows not whither it may flee. I have always thought that the worst type of bully is the teacher in school or in college who indulges a pretty talent for satire at the expense of h

hows well enough that his soul has kept young and clear amid his world of "muckers" and "grinds" and "cads" and "rotten sneaks," and all the men and things and conditions he is in the habit of depicting in various stages of damnation. "Now, you're

I am fifteen years older than he, I am bald, obscure, and far from prosperous, and there is unmistakably nothing about me to dazzle the youthful imagination. Yet the facts are as I have stated them. Philip likes to be with me, copies me without apparently trying to, and has chosen my professi

ten severest upon ourselves; that if Philip finds certain high qualities in me, perhaps there is in me something exceptional. I even go so far as to draw up a little catalogue of my acts and achievements. I can recall men who have said much sillier things than I have ever said, and published much worse stuff than I have ever written. I repeat to myself the rather striking epigram I made at Smith's house last w

was sorry for me in turn. "I don't in the least mind your telling me what you think about the way we fellows talk," he said. "That's the advantage of having a

hat out for yours

n I was resorting to irony. Bu

tle Russian shop I discovered some time ago. They draw better than any cigarette I have ever smoked. Of course, there are women who are serious and all that. There are a lot in the postgraduate department and some in the optional literature courses. But you ought to see them! And such grinds. None of us fellows stands a ghost

w Philip borrow a dollar from his mother before setting out for an ice-cream parlour in the company of two girl cousins. The Patient Observer has changed little in the last two years; his hair may be a little thinner and his knowledge of doctors' bills a little more complete. But in Philip of to-da

the 'profs' hand you out up there." His fervent young spirit would not be silent until, with one magnificent gesture, he had swept the tobacco jar to the floo