An Eton Kit-Cat by Oscar Wilde

"Well," said Erskine, lighting a cigarette, "I must begin by telling you / about Cyril Graham himself. He and I were at the same house at Eton. I / was a year or two older than he was, but we were immense friends, and did / all our work and all our play together. There was, of course, a good / deal more play than work, but I cannot say that I am sorry for that. It / is always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education, / and what I learned in the playing fields at Eton has been quite as useful / to me as anything I was taught at Cambridge. I should tell you that / Cyril's father and mother were both dead. They had been drowned in a / horrible yachting accident off the Isle of Wight. His father had been in / the diplomatic service, and had married a daughter, the only daughter, in / fact, of old Lord Crediton, who became Cyril's guardian after the death / of his parents. I don't think that Lord Crediton cared very much for / Cyril. He had never really forgiven his daughter for marrying a man who / had not a title. He was an extraordinary old aristocrat, who swore like / a costermonger, and had the manners of a farmer. I remember seeing him / once on Speech-day.

He growled at me, gave me a sovereign, and told me / not to grow up 'a damned Radical' like my father. Cyril had very little / affection for him, and was only too glad to spend most of his holidays / with us in Scotland. They never really got on together at all. Cyril / thought him a bear, and he thought Cyril effeminate. He was effeminate, / I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capital / fencer. In fact he got the foils before he left Eton. But he was very / languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had a / strong objection to football. The two things that really gave him / pleasure were poetry and acting. At Eton he was always dressing up and / reciting Shakespeare, and when he went up to Trinity he became a member / of the A. D. C. his first term. I remember I was always very jealous of / his acting. I was absurdly devoted to him; I suppose because we were so / different in some things. I was a rather awkward, weakly lad, with huge / feet, and horribly freckled. Freckles run in Scotch families just as / gout does in English families. Cyril used to say that of the two he / preferred the gout; but he always set an absurdly high value on personal / appearance, and once read a paper before our debating society to prove / that it was better to be good-looking than to be good. He certainly was / wonderfully handsome.