He resumed the conversation in a more sympathetic tone, turning it to those subjects which seem to be eternally interesting to males of thirteen years of age who are entering upon school life--a boy’s sisters’ names, his pocket-money, the sport he has had at home, and the means of satisfying a master’s requirements with the smallest possible expenditure of personal trouble. But he discovered--and the discovery was a great surprise to him--that these subjects, so natural among schoolboys, were nearly all painful or difficult to Gerald Eversley. Boys have been always strangely sensitive about their female relations. They have often felt, or affected to feel, a shame of their sisters--though, heaven knows the sisters had generally far more cause to be ashamed of their brothers than their brothers of them--and it has been a point of honour to conceal their names and their very existence. Boys have been known to deny that they had sisters, though at the time they were receiving letters and presents from them. It is said that a boy once carried his dislike of the female sex to the point of denying that he had ever had a mother. Gerald Eversley was not experienced in the ways of school life; but when he was asked for his sisters’ names, he found a difficulty in admitting that he had eight sisters possessing an accumulated total of nineteen Christian names; and Harry Venniker, who had only one sister, and had not conceived the possibility of anybody having as many as eight, grew conscious, after hearing some half-dozen of the names, that his question was rather an awkward one, and he did not press for a complete answer to it.