My second benefactor was nominally a boy, though in reality he was nearly as old as the master, and was leaving at the end of the term to go up to Oxford.  He took me by the shoulder one evening in the dusk, and walked me round and round the big clump of rhododendrons that stood in the drive in front of the school.  I did not understand half he said, but to my great astonishment I heard him confessing that he had always been unhappy at school, although at the end he was captain in lessons, in games, in everything.  I was, of course, highly flattered that this giant should speak to me as an equal, and admit me to his confidences.  But I was even more delighted with the encouraging light he threw on school life.  “You’re only here for a little spell, you know; you’ll be surprised how short it is.  And don’t be miserable just because you’re different.  I’m different; it’s a jolly good thing to be different.”  I was not used, to people who took this wide view of circumstance, and his voice in the shadows sounded like some one speaking in a story-book.  Yet although his monologue gave me an entirely new conception of life, no more of it lingers in my mind, save his last reflective criticism.  “All the same, I don’t see why you should always have dirty nails.”  He never confided in me again, and I would have died rather than have reminded him of his kindly indiscretion; but when he passed me in the playground he seemed to look at me with a kind of reticent interest, and it occurred to me that after all my queerness might not be such a bad thing, might even be something to be proud of.

The value of this discovery to me can hardly be exaggerated.  Hitherto in my relationships with the boys I had fought nothing but losing battles, for I had taken it for granted that they were right and I was wrong.  But now that I had hit on the astonishing theory that the individual has the right to think for himself, I saw quite clearly that most of their standards of conduct sprang from their sheep-like stupidity.  They moved in flocks because they had not the courage to choose a line for themselves.  The material result of this new theory of life was to make me enormously conceited, and I moved among my comrades with a mysterious confidence, and gave myself the airs of a Byron in knickerbockers.  My unpopularity increased by leaps and bounds, but so did my moral courage, and I accepted the belated efforts of my school-fellows to knock the intelligence out of me as so many tributes to the force of my individuality.  I no longer cried in my bed at night, but lay awake enraptured at the profundity of my thoughts.  After years of unquestioning humility I enjoyed a prolonged debauch of intellectual pride, and I marvelled at the little boy of yesterday who had wept because he could not be an imbecile.  It was the apotheosis of the ugly duckling, and I saw my swan’s plumage reflected in the placid faces of the boys around me, as in the vacant waters of a pool.  As yet I did not dream of a moulting season, still less that a day would come when I should envy the ducks their domestic ease and the unthinking tranquillity of their lives.  A little boy may be excused for not realising that Hans Andersen’s story is only the prelude to a sadder story that he had not the heart to write.