I spent many troubled nights puzzling out my conduct, trying to whip myself into a fury against Worthing, for I knew well that if I were to be revenged on him it would only be in a moment of frenzy. But all was of no avail. I was struggling against something which had mastered me; and that wasn't the greater strength of my antagonist, but the strange knowledge that somehow I loved and admired him, and would give my life if he were in danger. It may have been his spiritual power which dominated me, or it may have been the admiration in his voice, usually so scornful, when he had said, "That was well done," which set vibrating some chord of affection in me; but however it was, I knew for a certainty that I had found not an enemy but a friend. And the friendship deepened, though it was a strange one; for Worthing was my opposite in every way. He had an intellect like a sharpened knife, making my brain in comparison like a cushion or a cloud, a dull soft sort of thing. Naturally he was high up in the school, which added to the strangeness of our friendship, and his whole outlook and morality were as yet things unknown to me. For he was intending to study law, and already he had a large share of the lawyer's coldness and aloofness, looking clean through the human elements of a question to the legal considerations beyond. And this was one of the things which marked him out unique among his fellows, for though respected and even feared by everybody he hadn't a single friend; and naturally so; for being deeply impressed by the dignity of law and order, living as it were in the shadow of his future career, he had constituted himself a sort of self-elected champion of the authorities, lending them the support of his extraordinary influence, lecturing us even on the necessity of obedience, and somehow impressing us with the absurd childishness of rebellion against established rule, though needless to say the impression melted with the closing of the door behind him. But though his intellect was so keen and his personality so electric, he had nothing of the bulk and muscle which about this time I was beginning to develop at a prodigious pace. I could have crushed him with a finger, yet he subdued me with a glance. I don't intend to describe the full course of our growing friendship. At first indeed I struggled against the feeling of affection which in my heart I knew I felt for him. I think it must have been the sort of affection a dog feels for the master who is gradually taming and training it and breaking it to his will. Perhaps in my feelings towards him there was even an element of pity which helped to cement our comradeship, for he was so utterly lonely that in my heart, though inveighing against him, I yearned towards him. And certainly his courage, though not of the hardy physical type which I was best fitted to understand, appealed to my sense of the heroic.