I was willing to take Pelet for what he seemed-to believe him benevolent and friendly until some untoward event should prove him otherwise. Certainly it was agreeable, when the day’s work was over, to find one’s employer an intelligent and cheerful companion and if he was sometimes a little sarcastic and sometimes a little too insinuating, and if I did discover that his mildness was more a matter of appearance than of reality-if I did occasionally suspect the existence of flint or steel under an external covering of velvet-still we are none of us perfect and weary as I was of the atmosphere of brutality and insolence in which I had constantly lived at X-, I had no inclination now, on casting anchor in calmer regions, to institute at once a prying search after defects that were scrupulously withdrawn and carefully veiled from my view. This idea, of injustice somewhat poisoned the pleasure I might otherwise have derived from Pelet’s soft affable manner to myself. Flamands certainly they were, and both had the true Flamand physiognomy, where intellectual inferiority is marked in lines none can mistake still they were men, and, in the main, honest men and I could not see why their being aboriginals of the flat, dull soil should serve as a pretext for treating them with perpetual severity and contempt.

I believe he perceived once or twice that I was a little shocked at the difference he made between them and me, and accounted for it by saying, with a quiet sarcastic smile-Īnd then he took his cigar gently from his lips and spat on the painted floor of the room in which we were sitting. I fear, however, two poor, hard-worked Belgian ushers in the establishment could not have said as much to them the director’s manner was invariably dry, stern, and cool. I had to endure from him neither cold neglect, irritating interference, nor pretentious assumption of superiority.

You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today!ĪND Pelet himself? How did I continue to like him? Oh, extremely well! Nothing could be more smooth, gentlemanlike, and even friendly, than his demeanour to me. The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser.

The Professor by Charlotte Brontë