The boyish weakness of this speech, combined with its great selfishness, made it a poor one indeed. And yet Bradley Headstone, used to the little audience of a school, and unused to the larger ways of men, showed a kind of exultation in it.

“Now I tell Mr. Eugene Wrayburn,” pursued the boy, forced into the use of the third person by the hopelessness of addressing him in the first, “that I object to his having any acquaintance at all with my sister, and that I request him to drop it altogether. He is not to take it into his head that I am afraid of my sister’s caring for him ⁠—”

(As the boy sneered, the Master sneered, and Eugene blew off the feathery ash again.)