The Professor by Charlotte Brontë Page B

down my lesson to the lowest
level of my dullest pupil's capacity—when I had shown myself the
mildest, the most tolerant of masters—a word of impertinence, a
movement of disobedience, changed me at once into a despot. I
offered then but one alternative—submission and acknowledgment
of error, or ignominious expulsion. This system answered, and my
influence, by degrees, became established on a firm basis. "The
boy is father to the man," it is said; and so I often thought
when looked at my boys and remembered the political history of
their ancestors. Pelet's school was merely an epitome of the
Belgian nation.

Chapter VIII
*
    AND 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. I had to endure
from him neither cold neglect, irritating interference, nor
pretentious assumption of superiority. 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 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—
    "Ce ne sont que des Flamands—allez!"
    And then he took his cigar gently from his lips and spat on the
painted floor of the room in which we were sitting. 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. This idea, of injustice somewhat poisoned
the pleasure I might otherwise have derived from Pelet's soft
affable manner to myself. 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. I was
willing to take Pelet for what he seemed—to believe him
benevolent and friendly until some untoward event should prove
him otherwise. He was not married, and I soon perceived he had
all a Frenchman's, all a Parisian's notions about matrimony and
women. I suspected a degree of laxity in his code of morals,
there was something so cold and BLASE in his tone whenever he
alluded to what he called "le beau sexe;" but he was too
gentlemanlike to intrude topics I did not invite, and as he was
really intelligent and really fond of intellectual subjects of
discourse, he and I always found enough to talk about, without
seeking themes in the mire. I hated his fashion of mentioning
love; I abhorred, from my soul, mere licentiousness. He felt the
difference of our notions, and, by mutual consent, we kept off
ground debateable.
    Pelet's house was kept and his kitchen managed by his mother, a
real old Frenchwoman; she had been handsome—at least she told me
so, and I strove to believe her; she was now ugly, as only
continental old women can be; perhaps, though, her style of dress
made her look uglier than she really was. Indoors she would go
about without cap, her grey hair strangely dishevelled; then,
when at home, she seldom wore a gown—only a shabby cotton
camisole; shoes, too, were strangers to her feet, and in lieu of
them she sported roomy slippers, trodden down at the