Page 344 - david-copperfield

you,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘It might have simplified my office
very much, if I had known it before. But I confess I enter-
tained another impression.’
Doctor Strong regarded him with a puzzled and doubt-
ing look, which almost immediately subsided into a smile
that gave me great encouragement; for it was full of ami-
ability and sweetness, and there was a simplicity in it, and
indeed in his whole manner, when the studious, pondering
frost upon it was got through, very attractive and hopeful to
a young scholar like me. Repeating ‘no’, and ‘not the least’,
and other short assurances to the same purport, Doctor
Strong jogged on before us, at a queer, uneven pace; and
we followed: Mr. Wickfield, looking grave, I observed, and
shaking his head to himself, without knowing that I saw
him.
The schoolroom was a pretty large hall, on the quietest
side of the house, confronted by the stately stare of some
half-dozen of the great urns, and commanding a peep of
an old secluded garden belonging to the Doctor, where the
peaches were ripening on the sunny south wall. There were
two great aloes, in tubs, on the turf outside the windows;
the broad hard leaves of which plant (looking as if they were
made of painted tin) have ever since, by association, been
symbolical to me of silence and retirement. About five-and-
twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books when
we went in, but they rose to give the Doctor good morn-
ing, and remained standing when they saw Mr. Wickfield
and me.
‘A new boy, young gentlemen,’ said the Doctor; ‘Trot-