He didn’t persuade his sister, who despised him—she wished to work her mother in her own way, and I asked myself why the girl’s judgment of him didn’t make me like her better. It was because it didn’t save her after all from a mute agreement with him to go halves. There were moments when I couldn’t help looking hard into his atrocious young eyes, challenging him to confess his fantastic fraud and give it up. Not a little tacit conversation passed between us in this way, but he had always the best of it. If I said: “Oh, come now, with _me_ you needn’t keep it up; plead guilty, and I’ll let you off,” he wore the most ingenuous, the most candid expression, in the depths of which I could read: “Oh, yes, I know it exasperates you—that’s just why I do it.” He took the line of earnest inquiry, talked about Balzac and Flaubert, asked me if I thought Dickens _did_ exaggerate and Thackeray _ought_ to be called a pessimist. Once he came to see me, at his mother’s suggestion he declared, on purpose to ask me how far, in my opinion, in the English novel, one really might venture to “go.” He was not resigned to the usual pruderies—he suffered under them already. He struck out the brilliant idea that nobody knew how far we might go, for nobody had ever tried. Did I think _he_ might safely try—would it injure his mother if he did? He would rather disgrace himself by his timidities than injure his mother, but certainly some one ought to try. Wouldn’t _I_ try—couldn’t I be prevailed upon to look at it as a duty? Surely the ultimate point ought to be fixed—he was worried, haunted by the question. He patronised me unblushingly, made me feel like a foolish amateur, a helpless novice, inquired into my habits of work and conveyed to me that I was utterly _vieux jeu_ and had not had the advantage of an early training. I had not been brought up from the germ, I knew nothing of life—didn’t go at it on _his_ system. He had dipped into French feuilletons and picked up plenty of phrases, and he made a much better show in talk than his poor mother, who never had time to read anything and could only be vivid with her pen. If I didn’t kick him downstairs it was because he would have alighted on her at the bottom.