Worst of all, he caught himself yielding to thoughts like these: "But he
was kind to me--awfully decent" (a phrase caught from his elder
brother). "I remember how He ..." And then he would shake himself. "It
was only a silly old dream. He wasn't real a bit. I'm not a rotten kid
now that thinks fairies and all that true."
He was bothered, too, by the affectionate sentiment (still disguised,
but ever, as the days proceeded, more thinly) of his mother and sisters.
The girls, May and Clare, adored young John. His elder brother was away
with a school friend. John, therefore, was left to feminine attention,
and very tiresome he found it. May and Clare, girls of no imagination,
saw only the drama that they might extract for themselves out of the
affair. They knew what school was like, especially at first--John was
going to be utterly wretched, miserably homesick, bullied, kept in over
horrible sums and impossible Latin exercises, ill-fed, and trodden upon
at games. They did not really believe these things--they knew that their
brother, Tom, had always had a most pleasant time, and John was
precisely the type of boy who would prosper at school, but they
indulged, just for this fortnight, their romantic sentiment, never
alluded in speech to school and its terrors, but by their pitying
avoidance of the subject filled the atmosphere with their agitation.
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