But I gained Louis for a friend. He had, it seemed, admired the deft and unassuming way in which I had thrown that pot of jam--he knew even less than I did about that passion for notoriety--and when he met me in the passage as I came back from my six cuts in the prefects' room, he said, "I say, bad luck," and I suggested that if his friend Marsden's ugly face hadn't got in the way of a perfectly harmless pot of jam I wouldn't have got a licking. Thus, in a three-minute talk, we became friends; but when we each went to our own studies we didn't know we were friends--in fact, I was quite prepared to go on treating him as an enemy until, when we met again, we both seemed to find that we had something to say to each other. And throughout those years of school we had always something to say to each other which we couldn't say quite in the same way to any one else, and that seems to me to be the basis of all friendship.... I don't quite know what happened to Marsden, or how Louis told him that he had decided to discontinue his friendship. I have an idea that Marsden went on disliking me through four years of school, and that if I met him on Piccadilly to-morrow would recognise me only to scowl at me, the man who not only hit him over the eye with a pot of jam, but also deprived him of his best friend. Louis and I left school together; he on his inevitable road to Sandhurst, and I, with a puckered side glance at Oxford, to Edinburgh University. Even now I don't know why I went to Edinburgh and not to Oxford; I had always intended going to Oxford, my family had always intended that I should go to Oxford, up to the last moment I was actually going to Oxford--when, suddenly, with a bowler hat crammed over my left ear and a look of vicious obstinacy, I decided that I would go to Edinburgh instead. Of course it was a silly mistake. The only thing I have gained by not going to Oxford is an utter inability to write poetry and a sort of superior contempt for all pale, interesting-looking young men with dark eyes and spiritual hair who are tremendously concerned about the utter worthlessness of Mr. William Watson's poetry. Of course my own superior attitude may be just as unbearable as their anaemic enthusiasm over, say, a newly discovered _rondel_ by the youngest son of the local fishmonger; but I at least do sincerely try to face and appreciate literature boldly, and frankly, and normally, and not self-consciously as they do, attacking literature from anywhere but a sane standpoint, trying to force a breach in any queer spot so that it is unusual and has not been thought of before; and through this original breach will suddenly appear an Oxford face with a queer unhallowed grin of self-conscious cleverness; and all this for a thin book of poems in a yellow cover, called, as like as not, "Golden Oxygen"!