een there!"

The result of this was that for the future Finnemore was treated with a
little more respect. The Sixth decided that dances did not pay, and so
contented themselves with less noisy but little less aggravating
amusements. For instance, Finnemore's hatred of Browning was a byword;
so one day the entire form decided to learn _The Lost Leader_ for
repetition. For a while Finnemore bore it patiently, but when a burly
chemistry specialist walked up to within two feet of him and began to
bawl so loudly that his actual words were distinguishable in the School
House studies, the master covered his face with his hands and murmured:
"Oh, heaven spare me this infliction!"

On another occasion Betteridge walked quietly up to him, handed him a
Shelley, and without any warning suddenly shrieked out:

"He hath outsoared the shadow of our night."

Finnemore looked at him sadly: "My dear Betteridge, so early in the
morning!"

By many little things his life was made wretched for him. But yet he
would not have chosen any other profession. He had once started life
with very high hopes, but had discovered that the world is not in
sympathy with men of ideas who do not prophesy smooth things. And so at
an early age he found himself disappointed in all his personal aims. It
seemed that he had to harbour only the simplest wish to find it denied.
And then he realised that for the loss of youth there can be no
compensation, and that in youth alone happiness could be found. And so
he had decided to spend his life in company with high hopes and smiling
faces. There were times when an immense sadness came over him, when he
thought that disillusionment was waiting for so many of them and that
there were few who would "carry their looks or their truth to the
grave." But on the whole he was as happy as his temperament could allow
him, and Gordon, although in a sense he was the very antithesis of all
that he admired most, found himself strangely in sympathy with his new
master. One day the subject for an essay was "Conventionality," and
Gordon unpacked his torrid soul in a wild abuse of all existing
governments. After he had written it, he got rather nervous about its
reception, but it was returned marked _a_-, and Finnemore had written at
the bottom: "We all think like this when we are young; and, after all,
it is good to be young."

Gordon felt that he had found someone who understood him.

Finnemore lived in two rooms over the