CHAPTER VI
A LOOKING-GLASS, A SILVER MATCH-BOX, A GLASS OF WHISKY, AND—VOX POPULI
I
PETER, thirteen to sixteen!—and left, so it appears, very much the same, as far as actual possessions go, at the end of it as at the poverty-struck commencement. Friendship, Honour, Glory—how these things came and went with him during these years might have a book to themselves were it not that our business is with a wider stage and more lasting issues—and there is but little room for a full-fledged chronicle. Though Dawson's—and to take the history of Miss Gill only—of her love affair with the curate, of her final desperate appeal to him and of his ultimate confession that he was married already—provides a story quite sufficient for three excellent volumes. Or there is the history of Benbow, that bucolic gentleman into whose study we led Peter a chapter or two ago, Head for this year or two of Dawson's—soon to be head of nothing but the dung-heap and there to crow only dismally—with a child-like Mrs. Benbow, led unwittingly to Dawson's as a lamb to the slaughter-house—later to flee, crying, back to her hearth and home, her life smashed to the tinest pieces and no brain nor strength to put it together again. Or there is the natural and interesting progression, on the part of any child, behind whose back those iron gates of Dawson's have swung, from innocence to knowledge, from knowledge to practice, from practice to miserable Submission, Concealment, and a merry prospective Hell—this is a diverting study with which it would be easy to fill these pages. . . .
But the theme is Peter's education, and Dawson's is only an incident to that history—an incident that may be taken by the percipient reader, for a most admirable Symbol—even an early rehearsal of a Comedy entitled “How to Learn to be a Man, or The World as a Prancing Ground.” . . .
But with Peter, if you take him from that first asking
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