overed arm-chairs to
the window and slipped the rein from his thoughts, letting them gallop
where they pleased.

In all his life he had never experienced so much sheer emotion as the
last week had held for him. He had enjoyed his first taste of liberty;
he had stripped himself naked to music; he had found a friend. Any one
of these would have been sufficient to saturate him, and they had all,
in the decrees of Fate, come together. His life hitherto had been like
some dry sponge, dusty and crackling; now it was plunged in the waters
of three seas, all incomparably sweet.

He had gained his liberty, and in that process he had forgotten about
himself, the self which up till now had been so intolerable a burden. At
school, and even before, when first the age of self-consciousness dawned
upon him, he had seen himself as he believed others saw him--a queer,
awkward, ill-made boy, slow at his work, shy with his fellows, incapable
at games. Walled up in this fortress of himself, this gloomy and
forbidding fastness, he had altogether failed to find the means of
access to others, both to the normal English boys among whom his path
lay, and also to his teachers, who, not unnaturally, found him sullen
and unresponsive. There was no key among the rather limited bunches at
their command which unlocked him, nor at home had anything been found
which could fit his wards. It had been the business of school to turn
out boys of certain received types. There was the clever boy, the
athletic boy, the merely pleasant boy; these and the combinations
arrived at from these types were the output. There was no use for
others.

Then had succeeded those three nightmare years in the Guards, where,
with his more mature power of observation, he had become more actively
conscious of his inability to take his place on any of the recognised
platforms. And all the time, like an owl on his solitary perch, he had
gazed out lonelily, while the other birds of day, too polite to mock
him, had merely passed him by. One such, it is true--his cousin--had sat
by him, and the poor owl's heart had gone out to him. But even Francis,
so he saw now, had not understood. He had but accepted the fact of him
without repugnance, had been fond of him as a queer sort of kind elder
cousin.

Then there was Aunt Barbara. Aunt Barbara, Michael allowed, had
understood a good deal; she had pointed out with her unerringly
humourous finger the obstacles he had made for himself.