Though determined to keep his word to Jean Myles liberally, Aaron had never liked Tommy, and Tommy's avoidance of him is easily accounted for; he knew that Aaron did not admire him, and unless you admired Tommy he was always a boor in your presence, shy and self-distrustful.

Especially was this so if you were a lady (how amazingly he got on in after years with some of you, what agony others endured till he went away!), and it is the chief reason why there are such contradictory accounts of him to-day.
Sometimes Mr.Cathro had hopes of him other than those that could only be revealed in a shameful whisper with the door shut.

"Not so bad," he might say to Mr.McLean; "if he keeps it up we may squeeze him through yet, without trusting to--to what I was fool enough to mention to you.
The mathematics are his weak point, there's nothing practical about him (except when it's needed to carry out his devil's designs) and he cares not a doit about the line A B, nor what it's doing in the circle K, but there's whiles he surprises me when we're at Homer.

He has the spirit o't, man, even when he bogles at the sense." But the next time Ivie called for a report--! In his great days, so glittering, so brief (the days of the penny Life) Tommy, looking back to this year, was sure that he had never really tried to work.

But he had.