If John had those sensations about Felix, so—­when he was away from John—­had Felix about himself.  He had never quite grown out of the feeling that to make himself conspicuous in any way was bad form.  In common with his three brothers he had been through the mills of gentility—­those unique grinding machines of education only found in his native land.  Tod, to be sure, had been publicly sacked at the end of his third term, for climbing on to the headmaster’s roof and filling up two of his chimneys with football pants, from which he had omitted to remove his name.  Felix still remembered the august scene—­the horrid thrill of it, the ominous sound of that:  “Freeland minimus!” the ominous sight of poor little Tod emerging from his obscurity near the roof of the Speech Room, and descending all those steps.  How very small and rosy he had looked, his bright hair standing on end, and his little blue eyes staring up very hard from under a troubled frown.  And the august hand holding up those sooty pants, and the august voice:  “These appear to be yours, Freeland minimus.  Were you so good as to put them down my chimneys?” And the little piping, “Yes, sir.”

“May I ask why, Freeland minimus?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You must have had some reason, Freeland minimus?”

“It was the end of term, sir.”

“Ah!  You must not come back here, Freeland minimus.  You are too dangerous, to yourself, and others.  Go to your place.”

And poor little Tod ascending again all those steps, cheeks more terribly rosy than ever, eyes bluer, from under a still more troubled frown; little mouth hard set; and breathing so that you could hear him six forms off.  True, the new Head had been goaded by other outrages, the authors of which had not omitted to remove their names; but the want of humor, the amazing want of humor!  As if it had not been a sign of first-rate stuff in Tod!  And to this day Felix remembered with delight the little bubbling hiss that he himself had started, squelched at once, but rippling out again along the rows like tiny scattered lines of fire when a conflagration is suppressed.  Expulsion had been the salvation of Tod!  Or—­his damnation?  Which?  God would know, but Felix was not certain.  Having himself been fifteen years acquiring ‘Mill’ philosophy, and another fifteen years getting rid of it, he had now begun to think that after all there might be something in it.  A philosophy that took everything, including itself, at face value, and questioned nothing, was sedative to nerves too highly strung by the continual examination of the insides of oneself and others, with a view to their alteration.  Tod, of course, having been sent to Germany after his expulsion, as one naturally would be, and then put to farming, had never properly acquired ‘Mill’ manner, and never sloughed it off; and yet he was as sedative a man as you could meet.