It was, perhaps, rather surprising; surprising not so much that we were friends, but how we ever became friends; for there are many people in this world, who could be great friends with each other if they could but once surmount the first barrier, if they could but _wish_ to surmount that barrier--and between Louis and me there was much more than a simple barrier to surmount. We became friends in spite of ourselves, then; though Louis, as you may believe, had nothing at all to do with the affair; he just sat tight and let things happen, to him, for his was not the nature consciously to defeat an invisible aim, a tyrannical decree. As one of England's governing classes, even at the age of fourteen when I first met him, such a rebellion as that of forcing God's hand about the smallest trifle would somehow have savoured to him of disloyalty to the "Morning Post" which, together with the Navy, Louis took as representing the British Empire. I had been at school already one term when Louis came; and so it was at breakfast on the opening day of the winter term that I first noticed his bewildered face, though as we grew to prefects that same face aired so absolute a nonchalance that, together with my rather sophisticated features, we thoroughly deserved the title of the _blasted roués_. However, at that time, we were not prefects, but "new bugs," though Louis was by one term a newer "bug" than myself and my friends, and therefore had to sit at the bottom of the "bug" table and take his food as he found it. I, of course, took no notice of him at all; I maintained a, so to speak, official _hauteur_ about our meal-time relations--one couldn't do anything else, you know, if one wished to keep unimpaired the dignity of one's seniority. I had, in fact, no use for newer "bugs" than myself; I was quite happy at my own end of the table with the three men (ages fourteen to fourteen-and-a-half) with whom I shared a study. We made a good and gay study, I remember, for they were three stalwart fellows and I, even at that age not taking my Armenianism very seriously, gave a quite passable imitation of an English public-school man. How, as I looked round at my three friends and said to myself "here are companions for life," how was I to know of the irruption into my life of a bewildered face! I despised that face. It was the face of a newer "bug" than myself. But the wretched man could play soccer, I noticed; his deft work at "inside right" to my "center forward" warmed my heart; and, by the time the term was half over, he had gained a certain distinction for being consistently at the bottom of the lowest form in the school; one rather liked a man for sticking to his convictions like that.