I myself remember running to school (an extraordinary thing to do)
with mere internal ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott
about the taunts of Marmion or the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then
repeating the same lines in class with the colourless decorum
of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to be invisible in our uniformity;
a mere pattern of Eton collars and coats.

But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherly
equality if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track was
discovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy;
or if a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confess
feebly that he had read "The Mill on the Floss"--then Simmons was in
a perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less
any petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame.
He hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it made him
want to hide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy
which most of us have when some one betrays indecent ignorance,
Simmons had when some one betrayed special knowledge. He writhed
and went red in the face; he used to put up the lid of his
desk to hide his blushes for human dignity, and from behind
this barrier would whisper protests which had the hoarse emphasis
of pain. "O, shut up, I say. .. O, I say, shut up. ... O, shut
it, can't you?" Once when a little boy admitted that he had
heard of the Highland claymore, Simmons literally hid his head
inside his desk and dropped the lid upon it in desperation;
and when I was for a moment transferred from the bottom of the form
for knowing the name of Cardinal Newman, I thought he would have
rushed from the room.

His psychological eccentricity increased; if one can call