Alas! I knew what that meant. Yes, he must have it; it was
just the thing to help him with a something he was writing--'not to
read, you know, but to make an atmosphere,' etc. So he used to talk; and
the odd thing was, that we always took the wildness seriously; he seemed
to make us see just what he wanted. 'I say, John,' was the next I heard,
at the other end of the shop, 'will you kindly send me round that set
of' so-and-so, 'and charge it to my account?' 'John,' the son of old
Oldbuck, and for a short time a sort of friend of Narcissus, would
answer, 'Certainly,' with a voice of the most cheerful trust; and yet,
when we had gone, it was indeed no less a sum than L10, 10s. which he
added to the left-hand side of Mr. N.'s account.
Do not mistake this for a certain vulgar quality, with a vulgar little
name of five letters. No one could have less of that than Narcissus. He
was often, on the contrary, quite painfully diffident. No, it was not
'cheek,' Reader; it was a kind of irrational innocence. I don't think it
ever occurred to him, till the bills came in at the half-years, what
'charge it to my account' really meant. Perhaps it was because, poor
lad, he had so small a practical acquaintance with it, that he knew so
little the value of money. But how he suffered when those accounts did
come in! Of course, there was nothing to be done but to apply to some
long-suffering friend; denials of lunch and threadbare coats but nibbled
at the amount--especially as a fast to-day often found revulsion in a
festival to-morrow.
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