"'I remember, at school, Antony was always the first in the gallery to watch me playing a racquets match--racquets, of course, being the one game the poor man simply couldn't get at all, while I played it better than anything else. And sometimes I used to look up from the court at him, sitting with his hands at each side of his face, absorbed--in what? not the game, but only in the way I was playing it--the way _he_ himself was playing it! But, ridiculous as it all was, I had grown cruel about him, and let him see that I despised him as much as he despised himself; which, you know, was very much indeed--though he would have died rather than let the world see it. "'I had been working at my contempt for him very systematically ever since the age of about fourteen. It was my only protection against him, the only way I could prevent him from getting the better of my love for him--which was always there, mark you, for there was no doing away with that, it was as natural as the lava around a volcano. The advantage had been all with Antony until then, doing what he liked with me in the way of unpleasantness; but now that I had found this contempt (which I worked at just as a goldsmith works at a golden leaf, scratching and shaping and bending and filing it until it's every bit as lifelike as the original, but a good deal heavier), I was far and away the first string in the wretched orchestra; for Antony never did know what to do with contempt but physically smash it, and he and I have never raised a hand against each other except once--I suppose because it would have been such a trivial expression for what we felt. And so, not being able to answer it, it maddened him; but so obviously that I couldn't resist doing it again and again--until one night, at the end of my last term, I went the nagging limit, and he had to throw a bread knife at me and almost killed another man. But I dare say Ronnie has told you about that.... "'After school we saw each other once in a dozen months, if then, and only as acquaintances might in the street--and who, living in London these last fifteen years, could possibly avoid the figure of Red Antony? But step by step the thing went its same way--step by step feeding Antony's first mad idea with conviction. The wheel turned to my tune, never to his ... he who would have liked to be doing things with his brain and otherwise as I was doing them, whereas he had to be a soldier! For what else is there for a younger son with no brains and a little money to do but be a soldier or curate? And Antony believed in Heaven and Hell much too vividly ever to want to tell any one else about them....