As a four-foot high boy, with shrewd observant Scottish eyes, with a Scottish mind already beginning to hold its own ideas as to the universe, he was sent, through the reluctant generosity of an uncle, to a London public school. In those days sanitary and social reforms for overtaxed city schoolboys were still inchoate. Each boy must look after himself, make personal acquaintance with facts, with the cut and thrust of human circumstance, take his recreation on the London pavements, sink or swim as he listed. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, before he was ten had made acquaintance with a great many facts, all hard ones. He had no pocket-money, no tips. His holidays had to be paid for out of the same reluctant uncle’s purse--father and mother sleeping in a Perthshire kirkyard ere Geff could well remember aught--and were enjoyed under the roof of such persons as endure homeless schoolboys, on systems of rigid economy, as a business. Hard-working to excess, perhaps because in work he found a friend, pushed into dead-language grooves because the masters sought to keep up the dead-language reputation of the school, Geoffrey Arbuthnot awoke one morning at the age of eighteen a fine classic. He was sent up to compete for a Cambridge scholarship, won it, and, true to tradition, began reading, his heart warmed by the unwonted feeling of success, for his Classical Tripos. Considering that every aptitude he possessed lay in an opposite direction to classical study, one can scarcely look on the nine Cambridge terms that followed as fortunate. The square man did his best to fill the round hole faithfully, his own squareness decreased not. And then, in the midst of this Greek and Latin epoch, came his love affairs--I retract the plural: his one overwhelming passion, ardent, pure as was ever love felt by man for woman; a passion which paled, ere he could well grasp it, into shadow, and which still--yes, in the Guernsey sunshine of this June day--rendered his happiness paradoxical, just at the age when happiness should be fullest, most complete.