I disliked my brother apprentices, and did not get on well with them,
especially a certain very clever but vicious and deformed youth called
Judkins, who seemed to have conceived an aversion for me from the first;
he is now an associate of the Royal Academy. They thought I gave myself
airs because I did not share in their dissipations; such dissipations as
I could have afforded would have been cheap and nasty indeed.
Yet such pothouse dissipation seemed to satisfy them, since they took
not only a pleasure in it, but a pride.
They even took a pride in a sick headache, and liked it, if it were the
result of a debauch on the previous night; and were as pompously
mock-modest about a black eye, got in a squabble at the Argyll Rooms, as
if it had been the Victoria Cross. To pass the night in a police cell
was such glory that it was worth while pretending they had done so when
it was untrue.
They looked upon me as a muff, a milksop, and a prig, and felt the
greatest contempt for me; and if they did not openly show it, it was
only because they were not quite so fond of black eyes as they made out.
So I left them to their inexpensive joys, and betook myself to pursuits
of my own, among others to the cultivation of my body, after methods I
had learned in the Life Guards.
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