CHAPTER XIII
‘My dear Gilbert, I wish you would try to be a little more amiable,’ said my mother one morning after some display of unjustifiable ill-humour on my part. ‘You say there is nothing the matter with you, and nothing has happened to grieve you, and yet I never saw anyone so altered as you within these last few days. You haven’t a good word for anybody—friends and strangers, equals and inferiors—it’s all the same. I do wish you’d try to check it.’
‘Check what?’
‘Why, your strange temper. You don’t know how it spoils you. I’m sure a finer disposition than yours by nature could not be, if you’d let it have fair play: so you’ve no excuse that way.’
While she thus remonstrated, I took up a book, and laying it open on the table before me, pretended to be deeply absorbed in its
