Yet Mr. Lowden was really only a mild and inoffensive young man, who had been inspired with the unlucky idea that he could earn his living by teaching boys, when he had neither the desire nor the capacity to understand them. The aversion I felt for him was really founded primarily upon grounds less rational than those I have mentioned. The secret of the matter was that physically he was repulsive to me. He suffered, I imagine, from some affection of the lungs or throat, for he wore, winter and summer, a thick white muffler, fastened by an opal pin. His face was pale, cadaverous, and hollow-cheeked; his moustache scanty; his hair lank and damp; but what I disliked most was his peculiar odour. Whether this emanated from his person, or from the pastilles he was perpetually sucking, I don’t know. It was something sickly and persistent, and for no reason that I know of I associated it with death. When he sat down on the form beside me to work out a sum, I used to edge gradually away from him, until he would notice it, and ask me in a querulous voice what I was doing, and perhaps keep me in. This physical repulsion I could never have conquered, even had it not been backed up by that kind of mental sickliness which characterized him, and which had made him punish me once at least unjustly. He left six months later, and nobody among the boys ever knew or cared what became of him. Perhaps he went to another school, perhaps the mysterious odour which had sickened me had been really the odour of death.... * * * * *