‘Oh! hang it, Constable, we are not to have any preaching or dictating from you,’ cried young Dadd, colouring up and blustering. ‘If you don’t like our ways, leave ’em alone. We shan’t cringe for your company, of which you have made us a gift, without our asking for it, I may say.’ ‘I have not preached or dictated; I appeal to the rest of you fellows,’ said Oliver, without much loss of temper; while the fellows, who had their share of the old English passion for fair play, felt constrained to mumble an assent to the appeal even though it was against the deliverance of their comrade. ‘I asked you to drop that expression as a favour to me,’ repeated Oliver; ‘if you cannot grant the favour, at least you may refuse civilly.’ ‘Oh! if you choose to put it in that fashion,’ said Jack, a little sulkily, ‘there is no more to be said; all I meant to object to was any fine fellow’s thinking to come it over us, which I never heard he was invited to do, and taking it upon him to bid us mince our words to suit his delicate stomach.’ But Jack soon forgot his pique, and he made the concession of not repeating the offence within sound of Oliver’s ears, whatever he might utter beyond their reach. Possibly the censure had sunk so far into Jack’s somewhat obtuse mind, that he was rather shaken in the conviction of the embellishment, supplied to his conversation by his sporting the grossest form of oath with which he was acquainted. He might even fall into the innocent delusion of supposing that ugly expletives had ceased to be hurled right and left, in moments of excitement, by choice specimens—according to Jack Dadd’s ideas—of young swells at the universities. And Jack, with all his pertness and swagger, was not original. He secretly imitated the social superiors he admired and envied in his heart of hearts, while, on the one hand, he was professing among his own set supreme indifference to their claims, and on the other, he knew his own interest too well not to solicit their custom and attend to their needs with the utmost civility. For poor Jack played a double, nay, a quadruple part. In place of simply regarding his more aristocratic patrons with that combination of proper official outward respect, and individual inward contempt, which his father and mother entertained for them, Jack’s mind was farther divided between the two emotions of loving and loathing equally smothered and nearly equally balanced.