“One of the men at the Downsland Road School.... Not a bad sort.... I bet old Clotters’ll be mad if Weston’s girl gets anything. Clotters’ boy missed last year....” Now Clotters was the headmaster of the Downsland Road Council School. Mr. Weston did not like Mr. Clotters.... Mr. McGill did not like Mr. Clotters.... And even Miss Forsdyke did not like Mr. Clotters.... Thus it happened that Catherine obtained a scholarship to the Upton Rising High School for Girls. In her English paper she was asked to analyse: “There is a tide in the affairs of men....” She began: “There”--subject; “is” predicate; “a tide” object--according to a well-established form of procedure which sometimes enabled her to get her analysis right without in the least understanding what she was about. And in her Scripture paper she was asked: What is a phylactery? She answered: a kind of musical instrument. Catherine was rather surprised to get a scholarship. § 2 Long lingering September evenings with the sun splashing over the roofs of Upton Rising; the soft scented dusk creeping through gravelled roads; tier upon tier of houses astride the hill, with every window like a crimson star.... In the high road the newsboys were calling, the trams swirled citywards like golden meteors flying through space.... In the quiet residential roads was always the chatter of the lawn-mower, the drowsy murmur of hedge-clipping.... In these delectable hours of twilight Catherine passed from Upton Rising into Bockley.... Every night she passed, with swollen satchel under her arm--Luke’s Grove, over Makepiece Common, then along the Ridegway into the Bockley High Street.... And from the High Street into Kitchener Road there was a bewildering choice of routes, differing only in degrees of frowsiness.... Men passed her by like dim shadows heralded by the glowing tips of their cigarettes.... The policeman on point-duty in the Bockley High Street knew her. He said, “’d evenin’, miss,” and Catherine and the other girls who accompanied her on her way home used to giggle hysterically, for he was tall and handsome and presumably young. Catherine went home with Madge Saunders and Helen Trant. Madge was fat, good-natured, but lymphatic and uninteresting. Her father was on the council and kept a big drapery stores in the High Street. He called his daughter “Maggers,” and was excessively jovial and contented. When Catherine went to tea at the Saunders’, he called her “Carrots.” His humour was exhausted in the invention of nicknames....