other occasion one of the elder members of his form told him to go
to "Bogus" for French. Now "Bogus" was short for the Bogus officer, and
was the unkind appellation of one Rogers. Tall, ascetic and superior,
with the air of a great philosopher, he had, like Richard Feverel's
uncle, Adrian Harley, "attained that felicitous point of wisdom from
which one sees all mankind to be fools." He was one of the happy few who
are really content; for in the corps as Officer Commanding he could
indulge continuously in his favourite pastime of hearing his own voice,
and as a clerk in orders the pulpit presented admirable opportunities
for long talks that brooked no interruptions. In the common room his
prolix anecdotes were not encouraged. But in the pulpit there was no
gainsaying him. His dual personality embodied the spirit of "the Church
Militant," a situation the humour of which the School did not fail to
grasp. But of all this Gordon, of course, knew nothing. After a long
search for this eminent divine, in perfect innocence he went up to a
master he saw crossing the courts.

"Please, sir, can you tell me where Mr Bogus' class-room is?" He did not
understand till weeks afterwards why the master took such a long time to
answer, and seemed so hard put to it not to laugh.

The story provided amusement in the common room for many days. Rogers
was not popular.

It was in this atmosphere of utter loneliness and inability to do
anything right that Gordon's first week passed. Of the other new boys
none of them seemed to him very much in his line. There was Foster,
good-looking and attractive, but plausible and insincere. There was
Rudd, a scholar who had passed into the Fifth, spectacled, of sallow
appearance, and with a strange way of walking. Collins was not so bad,
but his mind ran on nothing but football and billiard championships. The
rest were nonentities, the set who drift through their six years, making
no mark, hurting no one, doing little good. Finally they pass out into
the world to swell the rout of civilised barbarians whom it "hurts to
think" and who write to the papers, talk a lot about nothing and then
die and are forgotten. The Public School system turns out many of these.
For it loves mediocrity, it likes to be accepted unquestioningly as was
the Old Testament. But times change. The Old Testament and the Public
School system are now both of them in the melting-pot of criticism.

For the most part Gordon kept to himse