by the common measure of the great English amenity, they yet hung
together, reinforcing and enhancing each other, in a way that seemed to
join their hands for an incomparably educative or civilising process,
the great mark of which was that it took some want of amenability in
particular subjects to betray anything like a gap. I do not mean of
course to say that gaps, and occasionally of the most flagrant, were
made so supremely difficult of occurrence; but only that the effect, in
the human resultants who kept these, and with the least effort, most in
abeyance, was a thing one wouldn't have had different by a single shade.
I am not sure that such a case of the recognisable was the better
established by the fact of Rupert's being one of the three sons of a
house-master at Rugby, where he was born in 1887 and where he lost his
father in 1910, the elder of his brothers having then already died and
the younger being destined to fall in battle at the allied Front,
shortly after he himself had succumbed; but the circumstance I speak of
gives a peculiar and an especially welcome consecration to that
perceptible play in him of the inbred "public school" character the
bloom of which his short life had too little time to remove and which
one wouldn't for the world not have been disposed to note, with
everything else, in the beautiful complexity of his attributes. The fact
was that if one liked him--and I may as well say at once that few young
men, in our time, can have gone through life under a greater burden,
more easily carried and kept in its place, of being liked--one liked
absolutely everything about him, without the smallest exception; so that
he appeared to convert before one's eyes all that happened to him, or
that had or that ever might, not only to his advantage as a source of
life and experience, but to the enjoyment on its own side of a sort of
illustrational virtue or glory. This appearance of universal
assimilation--often indeed by incalculable ironic reactions which were
of the very essence of the restless young intelligence rejoicing in its