, as a small
child, no intimate friend. His nurses, governesses, tutors, by their own
confession did not understand him, finding that he took himself with
unnecessary seriousness; a little afraid, too, of one whom they
discovered to be capable of pushing things to the point of enduring pain
in silence. Much of that early time was passed at Ravensham, for he had
always been Lady Casterley's favourite grandchild. She recognized in him
the purposeful austerity which had somehow been omitted from the
composition of her daughter. But only to Clifton, then a man of fifty
with a great gravity and long black whiskers, did Eustace relieve his
soul. "I tell you this, Clifton," he would say, sitting on the
sideboard, or the arm of the big chair in Clifton's room, or wandering
amongst the raspberries, "because you are my friend."

And Clifton, with his head a little on one side, and a sort of wise
concern at his 'friend's' confidences, which were sometimes of an
embarrassing description, would answer now and then: "Of course, my
lord," but more often: "Of course, my dear."

There was in this friendship something fine and suitable, neither of
these 'friends' taking or suffering liberties, and both being interested
in pigeons, which they would stand watching with a remarkable attention.

In course of time, following the tradition of his family, Eustace went to
Harrow. He was there five years--always one of those boys a little out
at wrists and ankles, who may be seen slouching, solitary, along the
pavement to their own haunts, rather dusty, and with one shoulder
slightly raised above the other, from the habit of carrying something
beneath one arm. Saved from being thought a 'smug,' by his title, his
lack of any conspicuous scholastic ability, his obvious independence of
what was thought of him, and a sarcastic tongue, which no one was eager
to encounter, he remained the ugly duckling who refused to paddle
properly in the green ponds of Public School tradition. He played games
so badly that in sheer self-defence his fellows permitted him to play
without them. Of 'fives' they made an exception, for in this he attained
much proficiency, owing to a certain windmill-like quality of limb. He
was noted too for daring chemical experiments, of which he usually had
one or two brewing, surreptitiously at first, and afterwards by special
permission of his house-master, on the principle that if a room must
smell, it had better smell o