into Hong Kong harbor or into the deadlier foaming rapid of Tsin-Tan rather than have had his mother know the truth about Nang Ping.
In his schooldays he had made half friends, half foes with a boy a few years his senior, whose influence, the little way it had gone, had all been to the good for Basil.
Basil had not done well at school or at 'Varsity. But 'Varsities are fairly used to that, and are built of long-suffering stuff, and young Gregory's shortcomings had not over-mattered at Queen's. But at school—a nice school, strictly run—he had been in serious trouble more than once, and once had been saved from expulsion by Jack Bradley, and at some sacrifices on Bradley's part.
Both the school and the 'Varsity had been rather inappropriately selected. Basil came of commercial stock and was dedicated to a commercial life, and commercial life of a sort for which a few years' business training in Chicago would have been more useful preparation than any amount of term-keeping at Oxford. But Gregory the father, who had had a very limited education, was, as is usual with such men of means, obsessed that his son should have the public-school and 'Varsity hallmark that he himself lacked. And Mrs. Gregory had wished it no less ardently. She had Oxford associations in her blood and of her girlhood, and her own father had worn an Oxford hood and held a modest incumbency near the town.
Basil Gregory learned some of the prescribed lessons at public school: he had to. And he might have learned something of books and other erudite lore at Oxford, for they do teach at the 'Varsities any one who insists upon being taught. But Basil had not insisted, and left Oxford knowing a little less than when he went.
