her than
professed soundly orthodox views about things in general, and I was
extremely careful to tilt my straw hat forward over my nose so as just
not to expose the crown of my head behind, and to turn up my trousers
with exactly that width of margin which the judgment of my
fellow-creatures had decided was correct. My socks were spirited without
being vulgar, and the ties I wore were tied with a studious avoidance
of either slovenliness or priggish neatness. I wrote two articles in the
Harburonian, became something of a debater in the Literacy and
Political, conducted many long conversations with my senior
contemporaries upon religion, politics, sport and social life, and
concealed my inmost thoughts from every human being. Indeed, so
effective had been the training of Harbury and Mr. Siddons, that I think
at that time I came very near concealing them from myself. I could
suppress wonder, I could pass by beauty as if I did not see it, almost I
think I did not see it for a time, and yet I remember it in those years
too--a hundred beautiful things.

Harbury itself is a very beautiful place. The country about it has all
the charm of river scenery in a settled and ancient land, and the great
castle and piled town of Wetmore, cliffs of battlemented grey wall
rising above a dense cluster of red roofs, form the background to
innumerable gracious prospects of great stream-fed trees, level meadows
of buttercups, sweeping curves of osier and rush-rimmed river, the
playing fields and the sedgy, lily-spangled levels of Avonlea. The
college itself is mostly late Tudor and Stuart brickwork, very ripe and
mellow now, but the great grey chapel with its glorious east window
floats over the whole like a voice singing in the evening. And the
evening cloudscapes of Harbury are a perpetual succession of glorious
effects, now serene, now mysteriously threatening and profound, now
towering to incredible heights, now revealing undreamt-of distances of
luminous color. Assuredly I must have delighted in all those aspects, or
why should I remember them so well? But I recall, I mean, no confessed
recognition of them; no deliberate going-out of my spirit, open and
unashamed, to such things.

I suppose one's early adolescence is necessarily the period of maximum
shyness in one's life. Even to Raymond I attempted no extremities of
confidence. Even to myself I tried to be the thing that was expected of
me. I professed a modest desire for temperate