“Yes, yes,” said Michael quickly. “For one thing,” he added as if he thought he had been too abrupt, “I’m too comfortably off to worry much about anything. Boredom is the only problem I shall ever have to face. Seriously though, Mrs. Ross, I really am rather shocked when I think of myself as sixteen and seventeen.” Michael was building brick by brick a bridge for Mrs. Ross to step over the chasm of three years. “I seem to see myself,” he persevered, “with very untidy hair, with very loose joints, doing and saying and thinking the most impossible things. I blush now at the memory of myself, just as I should blush now with Oxford snobbishness to introduce a younger brother like myself then, say to the second-year table in hall.” Michael paused for a moment, half hoping Mrs. Ross would assure him he had caricatured his former self, but as she said nothing, he continued: “When I came up to Oxford I found that the natural preparation for Oxford was not a day-school like St. James’, but a boarding-school. Therefore I had to acquire in a term what most of my contemporaries had been given several years to acquire. I remember quite distinctly my father saying to my mother, ‘By gad, Valérie, he ought to go to Eton, you know,’ and my mother disagreeing, ‘No, no, I’m sure you were right when you said St. James’.’ That’s so like mother. She probably had never thought the matter out at all. She was probably perfectly vague about the difference between St. James’ and Eton, but because it had been arranged so, she disliked the idea of any alteration. I’m telling you all this because, you know, you provided as it were the public-school influence for my early childhood. After you I ought to have passed on to a private school entirely different from Randell House, and then to Eton or Winchester. I’m perfectly sure I could have avoided everything that happened when I was sixteen or seventeen, if I’d not been at a London day-school.” “But is it altogether fair to ascribe everything to your school?” asked Mrs. Ross. “Alan for instance came very successfully, as far as normality is concerned, through St. James’.” “Yes, but Alan has the natural goodness of the average young Englishman. Possibly he benefited by St. James’. Possibly at Eton, and with a prospect of money, he would have narrowed down into a mere athlete, into one of the rather objectionable bigots of the public-school theory. Now I was never perfectly normal. I might even have been called morbid and unhealthy. I should have been, if I hadn’t always possessed a sort of curious lonely humor which was about twice as severe as the conscience of tradition. At the same time, I had nothing to justify my abnormality. No astounding gift of genius, I mean.” “But, Michael,” interrupted Mrs. Ross, “I don’t fancy the greatest geniuses in the world ever justified themselves at sixteen or seventeen.”