IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS 85

was feasible to me, represent my case to several gentlemen of an official and impressive aspect, and got my permission, and outlined the Supper at Emmaus with some real success in expression, and was extremely proud of myself. But my narrow knowledge of the language, though thus available for business, left me sorrowful and ashamed after the fatal dinner at Mr. Domecq’s,¹ when the little Elise, then just nine, seeing that her elder sisters did not choose to trouble themselves with me, and being herself of an entirely benevolent and pitiful temper, came across the drawingroom to me in my desolation, and leaning an elbow on my knee, set herself deliberately to chatter to me mellifluously for an hour and a half by the timepiece,-requiring no answer, of which she saw I was incapable, but satisfied with my grateful and respectful attention, and admiring interest, if not exactly always in what she said, at least in the way she said it. She gave me the entire history of her school, and of the objectionable characters of her teachers, and of the delightful characters of her companions, and of the mischief she got into, and the surreptitious enjoyments they devised, and the joys of coming back to the Champs Élysées, and the general likeness of Paris to the Garden of Eden. And the hour and a half seemed but too short, and left me resolved, anyhow, to do my best to learn French.

95. So, as I said, I progressed in this study to the contentment of Mr. Rowbotham, went easily through the three first books of Euclid, and got as far as quadratics in Algebra. But there I stopped, virtually, for ever. The moment I got into sums of series, or symbols expressing the relations instead of the real magnitudes of things,- partly in want of faculty, partly in an already well-developed and healthy hatred of things vainly bothering and intangible, -I jibbed-or stood stunned. Afterwards at Oxford they

¹ [For explanation of this “casual sentence about’fatal dinner,”’ see ch. x. § 201 (below, p. 174). The reference was to a previous passage in the first draft, which Ruskin had omitted on revision: see above, p. 81 n.]

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