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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 121
" He was very kind to me in my schooldays ; and Philip was
a fine little fellow."
" Handsome a boy as ever I saw. Does he keep his beauty ?
Father was a handsome man—very. Quite a lady-killer—I mean
out of his practice !" adds the grim Doctor. " What is the boy
doing ?"
" He is at the university. He has his mother's fortune. He
is wild and unsettled, and I fear he is going to the bad a little."
" Is he ? Shouldn't wonder !" grumbles Goodenough.
We had talked very frankly and pleasantly until the appearance
of the other doctor, but with Firmin's arrival Goodenough
seemed to button up his conversation. He quickly stumped away
from the dining-room to the drawing-room, and sat over a novel
there until time came when he was to retire to his patients or his
home.
That there was no liking between the doctors, that there was a
difference between Philip and his father, was clear enough to me ;
but the causes of these differences I had yet to learn. The story
came to me piecemeal; from confessions here, admissions there,
deductions of my own. I could not, of course, be present at many
of the scenes which I shall have to relate as though I had witnessed
them ; and the posture, language, and inward thoughts of Philip
and his friends, as here related, no doubt are fancies of the narrator
in many cases ; but the story is as authentic as many histories, and
the reader need only give such an amount of credence to it as he
may judge that its verisimilitude warrants.
Well, then, we must not only revert to that illness which befell
when Philip Firmin was a boy at Grey Friars, but go back yet
farther in time to a period which I cannot precisely ascertain.
The pupils of old Gandish's painting academy may remember
a ridiculous little man, with a great deal of wild talent, about the
ultimate success of which his friends were divided. Whether Andrew
was a genius, or whether he was a zany, was always a moot question
among the frequenters of the Greek Street billiard-rooms, and the
noble disciples of the Academy and St. Martin's Lane. He may
have been crazy and absurd ; he may have had talent too : such
characters are not unknown in art or in literature. He broke the
Queen's English ; he was ignorant to a wonder ; he dressed his little
person in the most fantastic raiment and queerest cheap finery : he
wore a beard, bless my soul ! twenty years before beards were known
to wag in Britain. He was the most affected little creature, and,
if you looked at him, would pose in attitudes of such ludicrous dirty
dignity, that if you had had a dun waiting for money in the hall of
your lodging-house, or your picture refused at the Academy—if you