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.