I pushed it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with suppressed fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other Continental cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father's society; and though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the deuce, he was ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased to covet.

At every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was alert to twist me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and becoming liker to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them for blockheads in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the ingenuousness denied to seasoned men.
Happily my aunt wrote to Mr.Rippenger for the address of little Gus Temple's father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley.
Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded, and in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity, and the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own.

He confessed he had found me changed at first.

His father, it appeared, was working him as hard at Latin as Mr.Hart worked me, and he sat down beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent Cicero.

I offered excuses for him to Mr.Hart, saying he would soon prove himself the better scholar.