Another matter of satisfaction was the fact that Mottele looked enviously towards him and made deliberate advances. And when he went to tell his sister Dorah, in Longton, it was surprising to find her stiff angular figure bending down and the hard mouth with strange vehemence kissing him. Sixpence and a new overcoat of a wonderful fluffy grey followed from the same quarter. Channah cried and bought him a little volume of selections from a poet called Shelley. But he appreciated nothing as he appreciated the pan of onions his mother fried for him, all in curly brown strips and steeped in butter; and more onions, and more onions, until he had had enough. And his mother looked at him, and he understood, for the voice that asked for another plateful was choked not merely by fried onions. BOOK II FORWARD FROM PHYLACTERIES CHAPTER VI Philip realized at no earlier age than is customary that life, anyhow externally, is a succession of illusions, and that, if reality actually exists, it must be isolated from facts and days, this inner reality being governed by one set of laws and the outer appearance by another. So that while poetry still dominated the inner boy as with a rod of changeless reality, he found it necessary to abandon, for instance, the old fancy of Doomington School in favour of the present fact. It was a matter of acute disappointment to him that one convention laid down by all his reading was not observed; for he was not seized by a group of young gentlemen clad principally in Eton suits and top hats to be immersed in a stream which ought surely to have flowed somewhere through the precincts of the school. The front of the building solidly enough lined a narrow central street of Doomington. A further aspect, and one which seemed to conclude its periphery, was seen beyond the grassless ground adjoining an even older institution. From no vantage were the leafy summits of trees to be seen and no stream issued from any portcullised arch in the walls. It was the antique Mitchen alone which thrust turbid ink in any visible proximity. But what secret bowers and what green places were hidden beyond the walls, some mysterious how contained in her unfathomed spaces, who could tell?