ng
is that I was more than a little shamefaced about it. I did not have it
framed and hung in my room open to the criticism of my friends, but I
kept it in the drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer locked
for a year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark
girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often when I
had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was sitting with it
before me.

Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a time
nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was locked in me.
I seemed as sexless as my world required.

5

These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above and
below and before me. They had an air of being no more than incidents,
interruptions.

The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City Merchants
School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the mooning
explorations of the south-eastern postal district which occupied the
restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere interstices,
giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant spaces between the
woven threads of a school-boy's career. School life began for me every
morning at Herne Hill, for there I was joined by three or four other
boys and the rest of the way we went together. Most of the streets and
roads we traversed in our morning's walk from Victoria are still intact,
the storms of rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's
London have passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of
them again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a
hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main gate
still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-proportioned
kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are imposing new science
laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the old playing fields are
unaltered except for the big electric trams that go droning and spitting
blue flashes along the western boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head,
very well, but I have not been inside the school to see if it has
changed at all since I went up to Cambridge.

I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a mind of
vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's estate and
developed a more and more comprehensive view of our national process
and our national needs, I am more and more struck by the oddity of the
ed