h, bolted
when he went to Eton, and padlocked at Cambridge. No one would have
denied that there was much that was valuable in his standards--a high
level of honesty, candour, sportsmanship, personal cleanliness, and
self-reliance, together with a dislike of such cruelty as had been
officially (so to speak) recognized as cruelty, and a sense of public
service to a State run by and for the public schools; but it would have
required far more originality than he possessed ever to look at Life from
any other point of view than that from which he had been born and bred to
watch Her. To fully understand harbinger, one must, and with
unprejudiced eyes and brain, have attended one of those great cricket
matches in which he had figured conspicuously as a boy, and looking down
from some high impartial spot have watched the ground at lunch time
covered from rope to rope and stand to stand with a marvellous swarm, all
walking in precisely the same manner, with precisely the same expression
on their faces, under precisely the same hats--a swarm enshrining the
greatest identity of, creed and habit ever known since the world began.
No, his environment had not been favourable to originality. Moreover he
was naturally rapid rather than deep, and life hardly ever left him alone
or left him silent. Brought into contact day and night with people to
whom politics were more or less a game; run after everywhere; subjected
to no form of discipline--it was a wonder that he was as serious as he
was. Nor had he ever been in love, until, last year, during her first
season, Barbara had, as he might have expressed it--in the case of
another 'bowled him middle stump. Though so deeply smitten, he had not
yet asked her to marry him--had not, as it were, had time, nor perhaps
quite the courage, or conviction. When he was near her, it seemed
impossible that he could go on longer without knowing his fate; when he
was away from her it was almost a relief, because there were so many
things to be done and said, and so little time to do or say them in. But
now, during this fortnight, which, for her sake, he had devoted to
Miltoun's cause, his feeling had advanced beyond the point of comfort.

He did not admit that the reason of this uneasiness was Courtier, for,
after all, Courtier was, in a sense, nobody, and 'an extremist' into the
bargain, and an extremist always affected the centre of Harbinger's
anatomy, causing it to give off a peculiar smile and