formed by a public school?

If I went a little in fear of them it was not because they bullied
me, because they had got an oppressive foothold, but because in their
really pathetic decorum and mysteriously permanent newness they
counted on me so intensely. I was therefore very glad when Jack
Hawley came home: he was always of such good counsel. He painted
badly himself, but there was no one like him for putting his finger
on the place. He had been absent from England for a year; he had
been somewhere--I don't remember where--to get a fresh eye. I was in
a good deal of dread of any such organ, but we were old friends; he
had been away for months and a sense of emptiness was creeping into
my life. I hadn't dodged a missile for a year.

He came back with a fresh eye, but with the same old black velvet
blouse, and the first evening he spent in my studio we smoked
cigarettes till the small hours. He had done no work himself, he had
only got the eye; so the field was clear for the production of my
little things. He wanted to see what I had done for the Cheapside,
but he was disappointed in the exhibition. That at least seemed the
meaning of two or three comprehensive groans which, as he lounged on
my big divan, on a folded leg, looking at my latest drawings, issued
from his lips with the smoke of the cigarette.

"What's the matter with you?" I asked.

"What's the matter with YOU?"

"Nothing save that I'm mystified."