Or rather the Head prayed, and George remained silent. He did not even say “Amen.” * * * * * After that the School gave him up and let him drift. He was supposed to be dull-minded as well as obstinate and unmanly, and was allowed to vegetate vaguely about the Lower Fifth. Maybe he picked up more even of the little they had to teach than they suspected. But as the silent, rather white-faced, rather worried-looking boy went mechanically through the day’s routine, hung about in corridors, moved from classroom to classroom, he was busy enough inside, building up a life of his own. George went at George Augustus’s books with the energy of a fierce physical hunger. He once showed me a list in an old notebook of the books he had read before he was sixteen. Among other things he had raced through most of the poets from Chaucer onwards. It was not the amount that he read which mattered, but the way in which he read. Having no single person to talk to openly, no one to whom he could reveal himself, no one from whom he could learn what he wanted to know, he was perforce thrust back upon books. The English poets and the foreign painters were his only real friends. They were his interpreters of the mystery, the defenders of the inner vitality which he was fighting unconsciously to save. Naturally, the School was against him. They set out to produce “a type of thoroughly manly fellow,” a “type” which unhesitatingly accepted the prejudices, the “code” put before it, docilely conformed to a set of rules. George dumbly claimed to think for himself, above all to _be_ himself. The “others” were good enough fellows, no doubt, but they really had no selves to _be_. They hadn’t the flame. The things which to George were the very _cor cordium_ of life meant nothing to them, simply passed them by. They wanted to be approved and be healthy barbarians, cultivating a little smut on the sly, and finally dropping into some convenient post in life where the “thoroughly manly fellow” was appreciated—mostly one must admit, minor and unpleasant and not very remunerative posts in unhealthy colonies. The Empire’s backbone. George, though he didn’t realize it then, wasn’t going to be a bit of any damned Empire’s backbone, still less part of its kicked backside. He didn’t mind going to hell, and disgracing himself and his parents and his House and The School, if only he could go to hell in his own way. That’s what they couldn’t stand—the obstinate, passive refusal to accept their prejudices, to conform to their minor-gentry, kicked-backside-of-the-Empire code. They worried him, they bullied him, they frightened him with cock-and-bull yarns about Smut and noses dropping off; but they didn’t get him. I wish he hadn’t been worried and bullied to death by those two women. I wish he hadn’t stood up to that machine-gun just one week before the Torture ended. After he had fought the swine (i.e., the British ones)