your father thinks I’m an awful stiff. But I feel so differently from the way he supposes I do—that’s all.”
Edward understood: he knew that a fellow who feels that he has been a quitter likes most of all to shut himself off from the world, and least of all to hear well-intended compliments. Sheldon was still in low spirits the next morning when Edward said good-bye to him.
At home the Crashaw family found Charles, who had arrived from St. John’s by an earlier train. Edward was disappointed by Charles’s nose, which looked just as swollen and distorted as when he had last seen it; and Mrs. Crashaw, quite unprepared for such a disfigurement, was shocked by it. She insisted on his placing himself in the hands of a specialist at once.
In consequence Charles submitted the next day to an operation, from which he returned with his nose in a plaster bandage.
“Always something in a sling when I have a vacation,” he grumbled. “A hand or a nose or something.”
