They would have preferred
to Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would have given me no more
than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class morality, for boys to
give one another, who would not unexpectedly send me a basket of fruit
because they happened, that morning, to have thought of me with affection,
but who, since they were incapable of inclining in my favour, by any
single impulse of their imagination and emotions, the exact balance of the
duties and claims of friendship, were as incapable of loading the scales
to my prejudice. Even the injuries we do them will not easily divert from
the path of their duty towards us those conventional natures of which my
great-aunt furnished a type: who, after quarrelling for years with a
niece, to whom she never spoke again, yet made no change in the will in
which she had left that niece the whole of her fortune, because she was
her next-of-kin, and it was the 'proper thing' to do.
But I was fond of Bloch; my parents wished me to be happy; and the
insoluble problems which I set myself on such texts as the 'absolutely
meaningless' beauty of _La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae_ tired me more
and made me more unwell than I should have been after further talks with
him, unwholesome as those talks might seem to my mother's mind.
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