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At all events, one fact is certain, and we can scarcely reiterate it too often the British baby is becoming emphatic beyond anything we can recollect as appertaining to the infantile days of the present generation. It is as though a ray of juvenile "swellishness," a scintillation of hobbledehoyhood, were refracted upon the long clothes or three-quarter clothes of immaturity.
Miss Roper, with all her skill, could not extract a word pleasantly soft from him once a week. But, nevertheless, soft words to her and from her in another quarter made him uneasy. Such being the case, must we not acknowledge that John Eames was still floundering in the ignorance of his hobbledehoyhood?
He was conscious of his hobbledehoyhood, of that backwardness on his part in assuming manhood which had rendered him incapable of making himself acceptable to Lily before she had fallen into the clutches of Crosbie.
The "challenge cup" soon passes away from the keeping of any house in a public school where Bunthorne is a popular and imitated character. But when we reach aesthetic boys, we pass out of the savage stage into hobbledehoyhood.
He was not bright and always ready, as was Crosbie, nor had he all the practical worldly good sense of Bernard Dale. In mental power I doubt whether he was superior to John Eames; to John Eames, such as he might become when the period of his hobbledehoyhood should have altogether passed away.
It was filled not only with a young lover's ordinary doubts, with the fear and trembling incidental to the bashfulness of hobbledehoyhood but with an idea that that affair with Crosbie would still stand in his way.
In truth, he was emerging from his hobbledehoyhood and entering upon his young manhood, having probably to go through much folly and some false sentiment in that period of his existence, but still with fair promise of true manliness beyond to those who were able to read the signs of his character.
But he was young, hardly as yet out of his hobbledehoyhood, and he would easily recover this blow, remembering, and perhaps feeling to his advantage, some slight touch of its passing romance. It is thus women think of men who love young and love in vain.
"Yes, God helping us, we must," said Phil. From that moment Philip Maylands and Peter Pax passed, as it were, into a more earnest sphere of life, a higher stage of manhood. The influence of a powerful motive, a settled purpose, and a great end, told on their characters to such an extent that they both seemed to have passed over the period of hobbledehoyhood at a bound, and become young men.
At present the curiosity for the traveller's opinion is a litde embarrassing, and more than once I was reminded of a drawing of Du Maurier's in Punch where a big man standing over a little one declares: "If any man told me that was not a Titian I would knock him down, and I want your candid opinion." There is a stage of national hobbledehoyhood and Australia has not yet grown out of it.
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