Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/18

 never like a sulky lout, however cruel the circumstances which had combined to make him one.

She felt a good deal more before the last print was in her album; in the first place that she would see really very little of these two boys until in years to come they rose to the Sixth Form table over which she presided in hall. Now and then they might have headaches and be sent in to keep quiet and look at the Punches; but she would never be at all in touch with them until they were big boys at the top of the house; and then they would be shy and exceedingly correct, of few words but not too few, and none too much enthusiasm, like all the other big boys. And that thought drew a sigh.

"What's the matter?" came in an instant from the other bureau, where the quill had ceased to squeak.

"I was thinking that, after all, these two boys have more individuality than most who come to us."

"One of them has."

"Both, I think; and I was wondering how much will be left to either when we run them out of the mould in five years' time!"

Heriot came to his feet like an exasperated advocate.

"I know where you get that from!" he cried with a kind of jovial asperity. "You've been reading some of these trashy articles that every wiseacre who never was at a public school thinks he can write about them now! That's one of their stock charges against us, that we melt the boys down and run them all out of the same mould like bullets. We destroy individuality; we do nothing but reduplicate a type that thinks the same thoughts and speaks the same speech, and upholds the same virtues and condones the same vices. As if real character were a soluble thing! As if it altered in its essence from the nursery to the cemetery! As if we could boil away a