and the far and difficult connections of such an effort.
I was lifted aloft on a great wave of infatuation and pity.
I found it simple, in my ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps
my conceit, to assume that I could deal with a boy whose
education for the world was all on the point of beginning.
I am unable even to remember at this day what proposal I framed
for the end of his holidays and the resumption of his studies.
Lessons with me, indeed, that charming summer, we all had
a theory that he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks,
the lessons must have been rather my own. I learned something--
at first, certainly--that had not been one of the teachings of
my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and even amusing,
and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time,
in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom,
all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature.
And then there was consideration--and consideration was sweet.
Oh, it was a trap--not designed, but deep--to my imagination,
to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me,
was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say
that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble--
they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate--
but even this with a dim disconnectedness--as to how the rough future
(for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might bruise them.
They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet,
as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees,
of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right,
would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form that,
in my fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of
a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park.
It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke