think of
myself as sixteen and seventeen." Michael was building brick by brick a
bridge for Mrs. Ross to step over the chasm of three years. "I seem to
see myself," he persevered, "with very untidy hair, with very loose
joints, doing and saying and thinking the most impossible things. I
blush now at the memory of myself, just as I should blush now with
Oxford snobbishness to introduce a younger brother like myself then, say
to the second-year table in hall." Michael paused for a moment, half
hoping Mrs. Ross would assure him he had caricatured his former self,
but as she said nothing, he continued: "When I came up to Oxford I found
that the natural preparation for Oxford was not a day-school like St.
James', but a boarding-school. Therefore I had to acquire in a term what
most of my contemporaries had been given several years to acquire. I
remember quite distinctly my father saying to my mother, 'By gad,
Valerie, he ought to go to Eton, you know,' and my mother disagreeing,
'No, no, I'm sure you were right when you said St. James'.' That's so
like mother. She probably had never thought the matter out at all. She
was probably perfectly vague about the difference between St. James' and
Eton, but because it had been arranged so, she disliked the idea of any
alteration. I'm telling you all this because, you know, you provided as
it were the public-school influence for my early childhood. After you I
ought to have passed on to a private school entirely different from
Randell House, and then to Eton or Winchester. I'm perfectly sure I
could have avoided everything that happened when I was sixteen or
seventeen, if I'd not been at a London day-school."

"But is it altogether fair to ascribe everything to your school?" asked
Mrs. Ross. "Alan for instance came very successfully, as far as
normality is concerned, through St. James'."

"Yes, but Alan has the natural goodness of the average young Englishman.
Possibly he benefited by St. James'. Possibly at Eton, and with a
prospect of money, he would have narrowed down into a mere athlete, into
one of the rather objectionable bigots of the public-school theory. Now
I was never perfectly normal. I might even have been called morbid and
unhealthy. I should have been, if I hadn't always possessed a sort of
curious lonely humor which was about twice as severe as the conscience
of tradition. At the same time, I had nothing to justify my abnormality.
No astounding gift of genius, I mean