d
Henry and Marsh shook hands and murmured greetings to each other. "I'll
leave you both here to get acquainted with each other," Mr. Quinn
continued. "I've a few things to do about the house!" He went off at
once, leaving them together, but before he had gone far he turned and
shouted to Henry, "You can show him through the grounds! He'll want to
stretch his legs after bein' so long in the train!"

"Very well, father!" Henry answered, and turned to Marsh.

His first impression of his tutor was one of insignificance. Marsh's
clothes were cheap and ready-made, and they seemed to be a size too
large for him. That, indeed, was characteristic of him, that he should
always seem to be wearing things which were too big for him. His tie,
too, was rising over the top of his collar.... But the sense of
insignificance disappeared from Henry's mind almost immediately after
Marsh had offered his hand to him and had smiled; and following the
sense of insignificance came a feeling of personal shame that was
incomprehensible to him until he discovered that his shame was caused
because he had thought slightingly of Marsh, even though he had done so
only for a few moments, and had allowed his mind to be concerned about
the trivialities of clothes when it should have been concerned with the
nature of the man who wore them. Henry's mind was oddly perverse; he had
been as fierce in his denunciation of convention as ever Gilbert Farlow
had been, but nevertheless he clung to conventional things with
something like desperation. It was characteristic of him that he should
palliate his submission to the conventional thing by inventing a
sensible excuse for it. He would say that such things were too trivial
to be worth the trouble of a fight or a revolt, and declare that one
should save one's energies for bigger battles; but the truth was that he
had not the moral courage to flout a convention, and he had a queer,
instinctive dislike of people who had the courage to do so.... He knew
that this habit of his was likely to distort his judgments and make him
shrink from ordeals of faith, and very often in his mind he tried to
subdue his cowardly fear of conventional disapproval ... without
success. But John Marsh had the power to conquer people. The gentleness
of him, the kindly smile and the look of high intent, made men of meaner
motive feel unaccountably ashamed.

He was a man of middle height and slender build. His high, broad brow
was covered