is so assured that it need never be even claimed or paraded.

[Illustration: _Photo by Hills & Saunders_

ROBERT HUGH BENSON

IN 1889. AGE 17

As Steerer of the _St. George_, at Eton.]

Still less was Hugh a typical Colleger. College at Eton, where the
seventy boys who get scholarships are boarded, is a school within a
school. The Collegers wear gowns and surplices in public, they have
their own customs and traditions and games. It is a small, close, clever
society, and produces a tough kind of self-confidence, together with a
devotion to a particular tradition which is almost like a religious
initiation. Perhaps if the typical Etonian is conscious of a certain
absolute rightness in the eyes of the world, the typical Colleger has a
sense almost of absolute righteousness, which does not need even to be
endorsed by the world. The danger of both is that the process is
completed at perhaps too early a date, and that the product is too
consciously a finished one, needing to be enlarged and modified by
contact with the world.

But Hugh did not stay at Eton long enough for this process to complete
itself. He decided that he wished to compete for the Indian Civil
Service; and as it was clear that he could not do this successfully at
Eton, my father most reluctantly allowed him to leave.

I find among the little scraps which survive from his schoolboy days,