lad with the hyena face, who bore the illustrious name of Douglas.  Strangely enough no one but Ingleby seemed to have tapped the romance in the hyena-faced’s name.  Setting out to find any tokens of Chevy Chase beneath the black mop, he was caught staring in Hall, and as a proper retribution for such insolence, subjected to the pain and indignity of a “tight six” with a gym shoe, his head wedged in two stocks of Mr. Griffin’s thighs.  New boys of his own age, and smaller, seeing this exhibition, formed a very low estimate of Ingleby.  They shuddered also at the knowledge that he had been heard to ask the difference between a drop-kick and a punt.

This isolation, except for purposes of chastisement, weighed heavily on Edwin.  He didn’t wish to be different from others, although he felt that his mind was somehow of a painfully foreign texture.  He knew that things somehow struck him differently . . . but he was so far from taking this as a mark of superiority that he was heartily ashamed of it.  His whole ambition was towards the normal; he tried vigorously to suppress imagination, humour, all the inconvenient things with which he had been cursed; to starve them, to destroy them.  He became studious of the ways of normality.  Griffin and the noble Douglas were handy exemplars; Layton, the head of the house, an unattainable ideal.  Layton, indeed, was something of a variant; but Layton, by means of his slim skull’s capacity for retaining facts and an ingratiating piety, had passed beyond the pale of everyday endeavour.  Edwin longed to be normal, and they wouldn’t let him.  He cultivated assiduously the use of the fashionable slang; and that, of course, was easy.  He whipped up an interest in outdoor games; played his very hardest in the ordinary house football, and even volunteered to take part in the Soccer games organised on fag-days for small boys by Mr. Selby, who nursed a lazy grudge against the Rugby Code.  “The Miserable Weeds,” they were called, enshrining his favourite epithet.  But though he plunged out of school every morning to practise place-kicking in the fields before dinner, Ingleby was not destined to shine in sport.  His habit of dropping off to sleep between fitful bursts of brilliance almost caused him to be uprooted from Mr. Selby’s plantation of weeds.  This didn’t worry him much, because Soccer was not popular; but after two trials in the house third, which the baleful Douglas captained, he was degraded to the scratch side known as Small Boys; and even here the scrum extinguished a talent that might have shone in the three-quarter line.

And since he failed in every endeavour to attain normality, whether by devotion to games or by those attempts which he made to prove that he was neither “coxy” nor “pi,” by a retiring manner and a foul tongue, he began to crawl back into his shell, nursing a passionate hatred, not unmixed with envy, for all those people whom he couldn’t hope to be like.  And so, in a little time, this dangerous humiliation turned to a sort of pride.  It pleased him to count himself their superior even when he was most downtrodden.  His form master had recently been boring the class with a little dissertation on Marcus Aurelius.  Edwin became a Stoic, spending his days in far corners of the box-room, munching a slowly dwindling store of biscuits.  Once Griffin caught him with his locker door open and pinioned him against the benches while Douglas made free with his Petits-Beurres to the rest of the box-room.  For such contingencies as this the Emperor’s system of philosophy seemed hardly adequate.

Most of all he dreaded the dormitory; for here the abandonment of clothes laid him open to particularly painful forms of oppression; the shock and horror of bedclothes ragged just as he was falling off to sleep; the numbing swing of a pillow, the lancinating flick of wet towels; Oh!—a hell of a life, only to be terminated by the arrival of Layton, who had the privilege of sitting up till eleven, with black rings round his spectacled eyes.  He was reading for a scholarship at Cambridge.  Then Ingleby would really get off to sleep, or sometimes, if he were too excited, watch the moonlight, broken by the stone mullions of the windows, whiten the long washing-table and cast blue shadows so intense that they heightened the bareness of the dormitory; or else he would listen to the harsh breathing of Douglas, who slept with his mouth open, and wonder what all those heavy sleepers were dreaming of, or if they dreamed at all.  And then his own magic casements were opened.

At St. Luke’s he had discovered the trick—quite a new thing for him—of historical dreaming.  His form were busy with the age of the Stuarts, under the direction of a master named Leeming, a mild-eyed cleric, rather shy of boys and feverishly grateful whenever he sprung a response to his own enthusiasms.

Ingleby drank deep of the period’s romance, and this heady wine coloured his dreams.  He would dream sometimes of the tenanted oak of Boscobel, watching with agony the movements of the Roundhead searchers; sometimes he would stand elbowing in the crowd about that scaffold at Whitehall, when the martyr king stepped out.  The man at his left hand had been eating garlic.  Ha!—a Frenchman.  One of those musketeers! . . .  He would tremble with delight.  He wished that he could tell Mr. Leeming of his dreams, but they were far too precious to risk being bruised by laughter or unconcern.  All night long this queer panoramic rubbish would go seething through his brain, until, at six-fifteen, one of the waiters swung a harsh bell outside the dormitory door and he would turn over, trying to piece together the thin stuff that its clangour had so suddenly broken, until the ten-bell rang, and the rush for early school began.  He grew to love the winter terms because the darkness lasted longer.

But he did write to his mother about it.  Always on Sunday mornings the sergeant would come in with a letter from her, full of the strangely remote news of home; how the garden was looking, what Aunt Laura was doing, and how they talked of felling the elm-trees in the lane.  Sometimes, with the lavishness of an angel, she would put a couple of penny stamps inside for his reply.  The odd stamp would buy a stick of chocolate or a packet of nougat at the tuck shop.  And in these letters she rose, quite unexpectedly, to the recitation of his dreams.  “How lovely it must be for you,” she wrote.  “When you come home for the holidays at Christmas we will read some of Scott’s novels aloud—Waverley and Nigel, and that will give you something more to dream about.”  He began to realise what he hadn’t seen before: that his mother was really a wonderful playfellow—much better, when he came to think of it, than any of the boys.  He would have so much to explain to her. . . .  “Oh, you dear, you are lovely!” he wrote in reply.

And then one day, that sneak Douglas, fooling about in the dormitory with Edwin’s toothbrush, happened to see the words that were faintly printed on the ivory handle:—

INGLEBY, CHEMIST, HALESBY.

“Oho,” he said.

At breakfast, after a propitiatory but futile helping of jam from Edwin’s pot, he broke the glad news to Griffin.

“Ingleby’s father’s a chemist, Griff.”

“Then that’s why he’s such a skunk, Duggy.  Is it true, Ingleby?”

“Yes.  He’s a chemist.”

“Then he isn’t a gentleman.”

“Of course he’s a gentleman.”

“Not if he’s in trade.