in's education had been a continuous insistence
on the importance of superficiality. It had been enforced while he was
still in the cradle, when a desire to kick and fight had been always
checked by the quiet reiteration that it was not a thing that a Trojan
did. Temper was not a fault of itself, but an exhibition of it was;
simply because self-control was a Trojan virtue. At his private school
he was taught the great code of brushing one's hair and leaving the
bottom button of one's waistcoat undone. Robbery, murder, rape--well,
they had all played their part in the Trojan history; but the art of
shaking hands and the correct method of snubbing a poor relation, if
properly acquired, covered the crimes of the Decalogue.

It was not that Robin, either then or afterwards, was a snob. He
thought no more of a duke or a viscount than of a plain commoner, but
he learnt at once the lesson of "Us--and the Others." If you were one
of the others--if there was a hesitation about your aspirates, if you
wore a tail-coat and brown boots--then you were non-existent, you
simply did not count.

When he left Eton for Cambridge, this Code of the Quite Correct Thing
advanced beyond the art of Perfect Manners; it extended to literature
and politics, and, in fact, everything of any importance. He soon
discovered what were the things for "Us" to read, whom were the
painters for "Us" to admire, and what were the politics for "Us" to
applaud. He read Pater and Swinburne and Meredith, Bernard Shaw and
Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad, and had quite definite ideas about all of
them. He admired Rickett's stage effects, and thought Sholto Douglas's
portraits awfully clever, and, of course, Max's Caricatures were
masterly. I'm not saying that he did not really admire these
things--in many things his appreciation was genuine enough--but if it
should happen that he cared for "The Christian" or "God's Good Man," he
speedily smothered his admiration and wondered how he could be such a
fool. To do him justice, he never had any doubt that those whose
judgment he followed were absolutely right; but he followed them
blindly, often praising books or pictures that he had never read or
seen because it was the thing to do. He read quite clever papers to
"The Gracchi" at Cambridge, but the most successful of all, "The
Philosophy of Nine-pins according to Bernard Shaw," was written before
he had either seen or read any of that gentleman's plays. He was,