The most beautiful letter ever written is undoubtedly that of Charlotte Brontë’s on her sister Emily’s death.
28 July.
No more work till the summer holidays. Have been relegated by the House selection committee to the dud tent at Camp, which amuses me vastly. Apparently those who manage the affairs of the tent prefer Bulwer and Maston to myself; more amusing still. Shall I get elected into the Reading Room next term? Probably not. I think as a matter of fact they want a mobbing tent which they know I would not join in, anyhow I shall be much more comfortable as I am: at any rate that reads better, and sounds so for that matter.
Apparently I shall get attacked if I wear my straw hat, a fact I can hardly believe. I have had the most heated arguments as to why I should not wear fancy dress; the fact remains that people are more prim and hidebound there than here, except that, as far as I can see, all and sundry combine to be rude to other schools.
29 July.
A sing-song in the Hall to-night, to which everyone but myself has gone: didn’t go for two reasons; first, because the cinema part of it was certain to be lamentable; secondly, Fryer irks me when he sings songs, and the applause he gets, for no other reason than that he is everything at games, and so is profitable to applaud, maddens me.
What is bad is that this school tends to turn the really clever into people who pretend for all they are worth to be the mediocrities which are the personification of the splendid manhood phrase. And in the end these poor people succeed and lose all the brains they ever had, which is distressing, particularly for me who could do with a few more.
Sunday.
Sing-song apparently a great success. There is an auction going on now, everything that has been handed down through the ages is being resold. I suppose some pictures have seen about forty auctions: the commonest are Thorburn’s petrified partridges, or worse still, those most weird and antiquated pictures of horse-racing, the horse’s neck being the length of its body.
Social ostracism which I am experiencing now for the first time for many terms is really incredibly funny. It begins with a studied vagueness when you address anyone, which means that he is frightened at being seen talking to you: it goes on, in direct ratio to the number of jaws they have about you, to a studied rudeness, and the lower and younger you are the more your room is mobbed. And then the whole thing blows over you on to some other unfortunate.