you mustn't have that.' 'Give me that hat.'
'No, dear--' 'If you don't give it me, I'll say 'At.' An exquisite
selection in the matter of hats has indeed always been one of the
great man's hobbies.

"When he had drawn pictures on all the blinds and tablecloths and
towels and walls and windowpanes it was felt that he required a
larger sphere. Consequently he was sent to Mr. Bewsher who gave him
desks and copy-books and Latin grammars and atlases to draw pictures
on. He was far too innately conscientious not to use these materials
to draw on. To other uses, asserted by some to belong to these
objects, he paid little heed. The only really curious thing about his
school life was that he had a weird and quite involuntary habit of
getting French prizes. They were the only ones he ever got and he
never tried to get them. But though the thing was quite mysterious to
him, and though he made every effort to avoid it, it went on, being
evidently a part of some occult natural law.

"For the first half of his time at school he was very solitary and
futile. He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things,
complete mental self-sufficiency and a comprehension of the
psychology of outcasts.

"But one day, as he was roaming about a great naked building land
which he haunted in play hours, rather like an outlaw in the woods,
he met a curious agile youth with hair brushed up off his head.
Seeing each other, they promptly hit each other simultaneously and
had a fight. Next day they met again and fought again. These Homeric
conflicts went on for many days, till one morning in the crisis of
some insane grapple, the subject of this biography quoted, like a
war-chant, something out of Macaulay's _Lays_. The other started and
relaxed his hold. They gazed at each other. Then the foe quoted the
following line. In this land of savages they knew each other. For the
next two hours they talked books. They have talked books ever since.
The boy was Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The incident just narrated is
the true and real account of the first and deepest of our hero's male
connections. But another was to ensue, probably equally profound and
far more pregnant with awful and dazzling consequences. Bentley
always had a habit of trying to do things well: twelve years of the
other's friendship has not cured him of this. Being seized with a
peculiar desire to learn conjuring, he had made the acquaintance of
an eerie and supernatural young man, who