Tommy and Grizel | Page 8

on fire.
"Try your hand at description, and when you have done chortling over
the result, reduce the whole by half without missing anything out.
"Analyze your characters and their motives at the prodigious length in
which you revel, and then, my sonny, cut your analysis out. It is for
your own guidance, not the reader's.
"'I have often noticed,' you are always saying. The story has nothing to

do with you. Obliterate yourself. I see that will be your stiffest job.
"Stop preaching. It seems to me the pulpit is where you should look for
the treasure. Nineteen, and you are already as didactic as seventy."
And so on. Over his exercises Tommy was now engrossed for so long a
period that, as he sits there, you may observe his legs slowly
lengthening and the coming of his beard. No, his legs lengthened as he
sat with his feet in the basket; but I feel sure that his beard burst
through prematurely some night when he was thinking too hard about
the ladies.
There were no ladies in the exercises, for, despite their altercation about
noses, Pym knew that on this subject Tommy's mind was a blank. But
he recognized the sex's importance, and becoming possessed once more
of a black coat, marched his pupil into the somewhat shoddy
drawing-rooms that were still open to him, and there ordered Tommy to
be fascinated for his future good. But it was as it had always been.
Tommy sat white and speechless and apparently bored; could not even
say, "You sing with so much expression!" when the lady at the
pianoforte had finished.
"Shyness I could pardon," the exasperated Pym would roar; "but want
of interest is almost immoral. At your age the blood would have been
coursing through my veins. Love! You are incapable of it. There is not
a drop of sentiment in your frozen carcass."
"Can I help that?" growled Tommy. It was an agony to him even to
speak about women.
"If you can't," said Pym, "all is over with you. An artist without
sentiment is a painter without colours. Young man, I fear you are
doomed."
And Tommy believed him, and quaked. He had the most gallant
struggles with himself. He even set his teeth and joined a dancing-class;
though neither Pym nor Elspeth knew of it, and it never showed
afterwards in his legs. In appearance he was now beginning to be the

Sandys of the photographs: a little over the middle height and rather
heavily built; nothing to make you uncomfortable until you saw his
face. That solemn countenance never responded when he laughed, and
stood coldly by when he was on fire; he might have winked for an
eternity, and still the onlooker must have thought himself mistaken. In
his boyhood the mask had descended scarce below his mouth, for there
was a dimple in the chin to put you at ease; but now the short brown
beard had come, and he was for ever hidden from the world.
He had the dandy's tastes for superb neckties, velvet jackets, and he got
the ties instead of dining; he panted for the jacket, knew all the
shop-windows it was in, but for years denied himself, with a moan, so
that he might buy pretty things for Elspeth. When eventually he got it,
Pym's friends ridiculed him. When he saw how ill his face matched it
he ridiculed himself. Often when Tommy was feeling that now at last
the ladies must come to heel, he saw his face suddenly in a mirror, and
all the spirit went out of him. But still he clung to his velvet jacket.
I see him in it, stalking through the terrible dances, a heroic figure at
last. He shuddered every time he found himself on one leg; he got
sternly into everybody's way; he was the butt of the little noodle of an
instructor. All the social tortures he endured grimly, in the hope that at
last the cork would come out. Then, though there were all kinds of girls
in the class, merry, sentimental, practical, coquettish, prudes, there was
no kind, he felt, whose heart he could not touch. In love-making, as in
the favourite Thrums game of the dambrod, there are sixty-one
openings, and he knew them all. Yet at the last dance, as at the first, the
universal opinion of his partners (shop-girls, mostly, from the large
millinery establishments, who had to fly like Cinderellas when the
clock struck a certain hour) was that he kept himself to himself, and
they were too much the lady to make up to a gentleman who so
obviously did not want them.
Pym encouraged his friends to jeer at Tommy's want of interest in the
sex, thinking it a way of