Whenever I see, on railway bookstalls and the shelves of Mudie’s library, a novel by Florence Barclay I am reminded of one of my first, certainly my strangest, school friends. He was not the conventional public-school type. He disliked games. He refused to join the corps. He had no house or school spirit. He was a fine swimmer, but never trained for the competitions. Games were compulsory. But I do not recollect to have ever seen him on the cricket field, and he played football scarcely once a fortnight. He arranged for every afternoon of the week a music lesson or a music practice. Authority let him go his own way. He was, in fact, the sort of person whom one would expect to be bullied, and thoroughly wretched generally. And yet he was not, I think, unhappy. Certainly he was never bullied. Even the swashbuckling element, in what was admittedly a fairly boisterous community, treated him with respect. This in itself would make him a well-placed candidate for immortality. But it is his study that I particularly remember. It was the sort of study that challenged enterprise, and an old boy on seeing it was reported to have exclaimed: “Good God! what must the house be coming to! Why hasn’t this place been shipped?” It was like no study that had ever been. They were small dark rooms, our studies, monastic quarters that lay under the shadow, on one side, of the abbey, and on the other, of the lindens and big school. We tried to make them brighter with light festooned wallpapers, allegorical pictures, and brackets on which we placed china shepherdesses; to the height of four feet the walls were panelled, and fashion decreed that the woodwork should be covered with long strips of brightly coloured cloth. It was a fashion that had been handed down, like the pictures, from one generation to another. Thus in my father’s day did they disfigure honest handiwork, and thus will they disfigure it when I am fifty. My friend had, however, little use for fashions. He decided that he would have his woodwork painted in mauve and black. And to match it he had the walls covered with a deep mauve paper. From the ceiling he hung before the window a mauve curtain, edged with black. On the window seat and on the chairs he heaped high a profusion of mauve cushions; the walls, for he was a great admirer of Napoleon, he devoted exclusively to a picture gallery for the dictator. It was, in fact, a study that would, in Chelsea, occasion a mild surprise; at school it made you reel in outraged dismay across the passage. Yet no one shipped it, no one turned the portraits of Napoleon to the wall, nor bedecked the ceiling with red ink; nor did anyone tear from their bracket beneath the gas the calf-bound set of Mrs Barclay’s novels.