“I’ll be twelve next month,” he said.
“Well, what do you know about that!” she said wonderingly. “I tell you what, though,” she continued. “We’ve got to get some meat on those bones. You can’t go around like that. I don’t like the way you look.” She shook her head.
He was uncomfortable, disturbed, vaguely resentful. It embarrassed and frightened him to be told that he was “delicate”; it touched sharply on his pride.
She took him into a big room on the left that had been fitted out as a living-room and library. She watched his face light with eagerness as he saw the fifteen hundred or two thousand books shelved away in various places. He sat down clumsily in a wicker chair by the table and waited until she returned, bringing him a plate of sandwiches and a tall glass full of clabber, which he had never tasted before.
When he had finished, she drew a chair near to his, and sat down. She had previously sent Leonard out on some barnyard errands; he could be heard from time to time shouting in an authoritative country voice to his live stock.
“Well, tell me boy,” she said, “what have you been reading?”
Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of printery, naming as his favorites those books which he felt would win her approval. As he had read everything, good and bad, that the town library contained, he was able to make an impressive showing. Sometimes she stopped him to question about a book—he rebuilt the story richly with a blazing tenacity of detail that satisfied her wholly. She was excited and eager—she saw at once how abundantly she could feed this ravenous hunger for knowledge, experience, wisdom. And he knew suddenly the joy of obedience: the wild ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate baffled desire was now to be ruddered, guided, controlled. The way through the passage to India, that he had never been able to find, would now be charted for him. Before he went away she had given him a fat volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited engravings of love and battle, of the period he loved best.
He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who killed the bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of banditry, in all the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in
