About Charterhouse. Let me begin by recalling my feelings on the day that I left, about a week before the outbreak of war. I discussed them with a friend who felt much as I did. First we said that there were perhaps even more typical public schools than Charterhouse at the time, but that this was difficult to believe. Next, that there was no possible remedy, because tradition was so strong that if one wished to break it one would have to dismiss the whole school and staff and start all over again. But that even this would not be enough, for the school buildings were so impregnated with what was called the public school spirit, but what we felt as fundamental badness, that they would have to be demolished and the school rebuilt elsewhere and its name changed. Next, that our only regret at leaving the place was that for the last year we had been in a position as members of Sixth Form to do more or less what we pleased. Now we were both going on to St. John’s College, Oxford, which seemed by reputation to be merely a more boisterous repetition of Charterhouse. We would be freshmen there, and would naturally refuse to be hearty and public school-ish, and there would be all the stupidity of having our rooms raided and being forced to lose our temper and hurt somebody and be hurt ourselves. And there would be no peace probably until we got into our third year, when we would be back again in the same sort of position as now, and in the same sort of position as in our last year at our preparatory school. ‘In 1917,’ said Nevill, ‘the official seal will be out on all this dreariness. We’ll get our degrees, and then we’ll have to start as new boys again in some dreary profession. My God,’ he said, turning to me suddenly, ‘I can’t stand the idea of it. I must put something in between me and Oxford. I must at least go abroad for the whole vacation.’ I did not feel that three months was long enough. I had a vague intention of running away to sea. ‘Do you realize,’ he said to me, ‘that we have spent fourteen years of our life principally at Latin and Greek, not even competently taught, and that we are going to start another three years of the same thing?’ But, when we had said our very worst of Charterhouse, I said to him or he said to me, I forget which: ‘Of course, the trouble is that in the school at any given time there are always at least two really decent masters among the forty or fifty, and ten really decent fellows among ♦the five or six hundred. We will remember them, and have Lot’s feeling about not damning Sodom for the sake of ten just persons. And in another twenty years’ time we’ll forget this conversation and think that we were mistaken, and that perhaps everybody, with a few criminal exceptions, was fairly average decent, and we’ll say “I was a young fool then, insisting on impossible perfection,” and we’ll send our sons to Charterhouse sentimentally, and they’ll go through all we did.’ I do not wish this to be construed