As I look back now on the past years, I find that the thing that penetrated most into my inner self, shocked me to the heart, and gave me no room and left no desire for any pretence about the will of fate and destiny, such as sometimes consoles grief, was the death of my friend Louis. Unlike most great friendships, mine with Louis began at school; and those, to whom circumstances have not allowed friendships at school, cannot realise the intensity of certain few friendships which, beginning on a basis of tomfoolery and ragging, as the general relations between schoolboys begin, yet survive them all, and steadily ripen with the years into a maturity of companionship, which has such a quality and nobility of its own that no other relation, not even that of passionate love, can ever take its place when it is gone. I have not happened to mention Louis before in these papers for the reason that he had actually come very little into my life in London. In fact, we retained our intimacy against the aggression of our different lives, which was rather paradoxical for the casual people we believed ourselves to be. (Without a sincere belief in his own casualness the modern youth would be the most self-important ass of all generations.) Our ways of life lead very contrarily; there was nowhere they could rationally touch; he, a soldier; I, a doctor, lawyer, or pedlar, I did not know which. But I had the grace, or if you like, the foolishness, to envy him the definite markings of his career; I envied him his knowledge of the road he wished to tread, and of the almost certainties which lay inevitably along that road.