They oughtn’t to have sent you to school here.  It’s a bally shame.”

That same afternoon Edwin was poring over a letter at his desk in Big School.  His mother always told him to keep her letters.  “Some day you may like to look at them,” she said.  He was reading this letter for the tenth time to see if he could extract some last scrapings of the atmosphere of home which it had brought him.

“Who’s that letter from?  . . .  Girl?” said Griffin rudely.

“A lady.”

“What!”

“My mother.”

“Christ!  Your mother isn’t a lady, or she wouldn’t have married a chemist . . . or be your mother.”

And then Edwin jumped up, overturning the form on which he had been sitting, and lashed out at Griffin’s face.  He wanted to smash the freckled thing.  He only caught the boy’s cheek with the flat of his hand, and then, after a second of dazed wonder at his own achievement, he rushed out of Big School, across the Quad, and up that white, dust-felted road to the downs.

CHAPTER II
GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY

I

Of course he got his thrashing in return; but, in the end, he found himself the gainer by that unthinkable outburst.  The incident had been noted, and there were those who relished the blow to Griffin’s prestige, a blow which no recriminatory lickings could efface.  Edwin assured himself that he had that day lighted such a candle in England as should never be put out.  It seemed, indeed, as though the affair had revealed to some of his own classmates that intellectual superiority which they had overlooked before; and, in particular, it made the basis of a friendship between himself and one of his rivals, a boy named Widdup, who combined with a head for mathematics—Edwin’s blank despair—a certain proficiency in games.  Widdup disliked Griffin.

“Great beefy beast,” he said.  “If they’d make him play footer and sweat some of the fat off him he’d have been a bit quicker on you.  He wasn’t half waxy about it.  He hates being laughed at. . . .”

And so, as the terms slipped by, St. Luke’s ceased to be a purgatory.  Edwin contracted certain timid friendships—as this with Widdup—and adored a series of perfectly ordinary prefects.  He shook down into his proper place in the scheme of things, and after that nobody took much notice of him.  Even the Griffin-Douglas coalition, who never forgave, troubled him very little.  Certain outbursts of persecution he took as a matter of course; such was the teaching of history; but the ways of these two were now widely divergent from those in which he trod.  The dormitory was the only place in which they inevitably met, for he had managed to move his seat in Hall some way from that of Griffin; and in chapel, the only other place they had in common, he was safe.

The friendship with Widdup notably ripened.  They were both members of the same branch of the Natural History Society, the one that was labelled astronomical.  The subject was unpopular, for its pursuit was nocturnal and made no exciting appeal to the hunting instinct of boys.  The section met every fortnight in the room of one of the mathematical masters.  And since they met at night, they managed to escape second Prep.  Their president, Mr. Heal, was a rather melancholy performer on the flute, and Edwin, generally contriving to turn up some minutes before the meeting began, would stand at the door listening to the innocent gentleman playing to himself unaccompanied folk-tunes that he had collected in the holidays.  At the first sound of a door-knock Heal would unscrew his flute and pack it into a case lined with puce-coloured plush; but it seemed as though an afterglow of tenderness still lingered on his unusually dull features.  As for astronomy, they never got much farther than the mere names of constellations and their figures, although Widdup often asked questions which almost tapped the mathematical master’s subject.  These adventures were discouraged, for Mr. Heal had grown to hate mathematics.  But they did learn to find their way about the paths of the sky, and often, on frosty winter evenings, when the clear vault above the downs was like jet, Edwin and Widdup would walk up and down the Quad and imagine that they could feel the heave of the spinning world, while they watched Capella scale the dome of sky.  And once, when he had come to the master’s room a little early on the night of the section meeting, Mr. Heal cleared his throat and, taking Edwin by the ear, began to read from an olive-green book that he held in his hand.  He read atrociously.  “How do you like this?” he said.  “H’m?”  He said “H’m” with a little snarl in it.

“The Dog Star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half up the southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it swung itself forth above the rim of the landscape; Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy square of Pegasus was creeping round to the North-West; far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia’s chair stood daintily poised in the uppermost boughs.”

Edwin thought it was “fine.”

“Better than the Story of the Heavens?” asked Mr. Heal.  “Come, come, Ingleby . . . surely not?”

“Rather, sir,” said Edwin.

Mr. Heal shut the book.  “The barren and gloomy square of Pegasus,” he murmured to himself.  And all the rest of that evening Edwin found himself remembering the phrase.  The bareness and the gloom of Pegasus had never struck him before; and now, at a sudden suggestion, the whole atmosphere of the sky had changed; the vague heavens became habitable to his fancy; new and immense territory opened before him. . . .

He told Widdup what he remembered of the passage that Heal had read.

“Poor old Tommy,” said Widdup compassionately.  “It isn’t an exact square at all.  It’s an irregular quadrilateral, and I don’t see anything gloomy about it.  Stars aren’t gloomy anyway.  Look how they sparkle.  Look at Vega.”

Above the gable of the swimming bath that wonderful star throbbed white.

II

In the Lent term they both had measles and woke with swollen eyes to find each other side by side.  In the same ward at the Sanatorium was Layton’s successor, Payne, a thawed, thin, almost unfamiliar Payne; and while they swam upon the first buoyant spirits of convalescence, the sheer hulk of Griffin was hove in, in the snivelling misery of the early stages.  Edwin thought that Griffin had never looked so beastly, and rejoiced in the pig’s humiliation; but when, at last, Griffin recovered he found his ancient victim a handy plaything, and for want of anything better to do attempted to seduce Widdup from Edwin’s friendship.  Edwin never quite forgave Widdup his defection; and when they were all better and back in school again he found that he still had to avoid Griffin on whom the habit of persecution had been regrafted.  It seemed such a pity . . . he thought he had outgrown all that sort of thing.

And now he hated Griffin for a new reason.  While they were together in the Sanatorium, after the departure of Payne, Griffin had spoken boastfully of his relations with one of the “Skivvies” whose morning task was the making of beds in D dormitory.  It appeared that Griffin had met her first by accident, and later by appointment, and