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continually meeting, considering, summing up and remembering nervous new-comers had laid a weight upon his head and dragged down his lips and his shoulders. But he made it his business to smile as he looked blindly down the long, uproarious dining-hall, where twenty new boys were having their first experience of a meal in Hall, and as many others, transferred this year from the Preparatory School a mile away, were assuming a loud equality with older boys, brothers, cousins and their friends. Social adjustments were in progress. To-morrow, when term officially commenced, there would be more of it; with the return of those eminent ones who allowed themselves to arrive as late as midday of the first day, the growling tolerance of this evening’s atmosphere would be keyed up sharply with something sterner, something (for any who would have dared to say it of the School) more brutal.
    On his right Mr. Jolly sat pointing his nose attentively at his plate. The exhausted lock of hair hanging over his left eye gave to the downbent penitence suggested by his attitude an air of sly and solemn rakishness. When he raised his head to speak to the Chief his nose swung across the vista of the Hall like an accusing finger—phallic and hortative had it not been for the dispassionate flatness of the nostrils. He glared round the weary lock of hair, growling.
    â€˜Noisy little beggars. During the holiday this experience was never quite out of my mind.’
    The Headmaster smiled with his thin shadowless lips.
    â€˜They look quite a promising lot, Mr. Jolly.’
    â€˜The same lot as last year’s, sir. The same as the years’ before last year.’
    â€˜It may be,’ the Headmaster said quietly. Under the waves of sound that cannoned against the pulp itself of his tired brain, he had little say. Like a man dangerously afloat in a sea, his concern was to swim to the safety of something as firm as silence and solitude, and into that harbour of sleep from which unhappily he put forth each morning. The hollow scar above his temple measured the beat of his heart. From habit he held his head high so that it should not be too much seen.
    There was little to be said among them all at the long table. Two younger masters, side by side on the Headmaster’s left hand, were laughing and pretending to make merry over their holiday experiences. Like most of the staff, they were Englishmen, graduating from Oxford to the divine Parnassus where schoolmasters seem—to their pupils at least—felicitously to dwell. These two young men, by nature alike and scholastically as opposed as the poles, had a doubly strong bond in their age and their memories of England, passionately green still in their green minds, at such an intensifying distance from Home. Even in the circumscribed world of the School, where they were encouraged and never deterred in their England-my-England cult, they sometimes felt themselves alien; but each would have scorned to admit that he was anywhere aware of a national personality in the boys he taught, and made Common-room jests about, and privately feared. The suggestion that their ‘little wretches’ were wild with the raw, crude strength of a young nation beginning to feel its horns they would deftly and politely have turned aside with a laugh or an oblique, comparative reference to their own Old Schools and the fellows at Home.
    So now, as they sat in state above the little wretches—who could trouble one’s self-esteem even at mealtimes—they did not allow themselves to acknowledge their noisy presence, and would not acknowledge, in their own hearts, that after a summer holiday in the south this, the inviolable temple of their cult, seemed very empty, very lonely, and pervaded with that sense of personal frustration which they spent their waking hours denying. They were laughing together, Penworth rather bitterly, Waters with mild and childlike simplicity; they were talking of the