Up to this time contact with our parents' world had got no farther than vainglorious imaginings of our proper entry into it, and now suddenly we found that we were in it, haled there by our own acts in the unhappy quality of offenders. I think this was the first time in my life that I had been glad it was Forester who was the boy and not I who was made to go with my father and Mr. Allingham to Ross's field to point out the damage, for which they paid. It was this which sealed the enormity of our offence, money was paid for it, and came near to losing its moral point with Forrie, who felt himself immeasurably raised in the estimate of the other boys as a public character. It served, along with my father's anger, which was so new to us, to raise the occasion to a solemn note against which mere switchings were inconsiderable. No doubt my brother has forgotten it by now, along with Effie, who got off with nothing worse than the complicity of having been one of us, but to me the incident takes rank as the beginning of a new kind of Snockertism which was to array itself indefinitely against the forces inappreciably sucking at the bottom of my life. It was as if, on the very first occasion of my swimming to the surface of my lustrous seas, I was taken with a line at the end of which I was to be played into shoals and shallows, to foul with my flounderings some clear pools and scatter the peace of many smaller fry--I mean the obligation of repute, the necessity of being loyal to what I found in the world because it had been founded in sincerity with pains. For what my father made clear to us as the very crux of our transgression, was that we had discredited our bringing up. Old man Ross could be paid for his vegetables, but there was nothing, I was given to understand, could satisfy our arrears to our parents' honour, which, it transpired, had been appallingly blackened in the event.