e's opinion. What he
liked, what he felt, what he decided, was the important thing to him,
and so long as he could get his way, I do not think that he troubled his
head about what other people might think or wish; he did not want to
earn good opinions, nor did he care for disapproval or approval; people
in fact were to him at that time more or less favourable channels for
him to follow his own designs, more or less stubborn obstacles to his
attaining his wishes. He was not at all a sensitive or shrinking child.
He was quite capable of holding his own, full of spirit and fearless,
though quiet enough, and not in the least interfering, except when his
rights were menaced.

IV

BOYHOOD

He went to school at Clevedon, in Somersetshire, in 1882, at Walton
House, then presided over by Mr. Cornish. It was a well-managed place,
and the teaching was good. I suppose that all boys of an independent
mind dislike the first breaking-in to the ways of the world, and the
exchanging of the freedom of home for the barrack-life of school, the
absence of privacy, and the sense of being continually under the
magnifying-glass which school gives. It was dreadful to Hugh to have to
account for himself at all times, to justify his ways and tastes, his
fancies and even his appearance, to boys and masters alike. Bullying is
indeed practically extinct in well-managed schools; but small boys are
inquisitive, observant, extremely conventional, almost like savages in
their inventiveness of prohibitions and taboos, and perfectly merciless
in criticism. The instinct for power is shown by small boys in the
desire to make themselves felt, which is most easily accomplished by
minute ridicule. Hugh made friends there, but he never really enjoyed
the life of the place. The boys who get on well at school from the first
are robust, normal boys, without any inconvenient originality, who enjoy
games and the good-natured rough and tumble of school life. But Hugh was
not a boy of that kind; he was small, not good at games, and had plenty
of private fancies and ideas of his own. He was ill at ease, and he
never liked the town of straggling modern houses on the low sea-front,
with the hills and ports of Wales rising shadowy across the mud-stained
tide.

He was quick and clever, and had been well taught; so that in 1885 he
won a scholarship at Eton, and entered college there, to my great
delight, in the September of that year. I had just returned to Eto