nothing of the habit. Well,--if I met those great gentlemen of the past
with their accents carelessly adjusted I did at least meet them alive,
as an equal, and in a living tongue. Altogether my school might easily
have been worse for me, and among other good things it gave me a friend
who has lasted my life out.

This was Ewart, who is now a monumental artist at Woking, after many
vicissitudes. Dear chap, how he did stick out of his clothes to be sure!
He was a longlimbed lout, ridiculously tall beside my more youth full
compactness, and, except that there was no black moustache under his
nose blob, he had the same round knobby face as he has to-day, the same
bright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment,
the insinuating reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart
used to play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with
wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository touch all
things became memorable and rare. From him I first heard tell of love,
but only after its barbs were already sticking in my heart. He was, I
know now the bastard of that great improvident artist, Rickmann Ewart;
he brought the light of a lax world that at least had not turned its
back upon beauty, into the growing fermentation of my mind.

I won his heart by a version of Vathek, and after that we were
inseparable yarning friends. We merged our intellectual stock so
completely that I wonder sometimes how much I did not become Ewart, how
much Ewart is not vicariously and derivatively me.

VII

And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my tragic
disgrace.