Doomington School lay outside him, poetry lay within. Doomington School did not want him. He would wait. Perhaps he too would some day attain the heavy-browed responsibilities of a form monitor, might be even the monitor elected by the form itself and not the monitor arbitrarily appointed by the master. But now all these concerns were beyond him, unintelligible. On the other hand, the rearrangement in his daily times produced by the school day was a matter of considerable importance. It meant that he arrived home nearly two hours before the nightly session of _chayder_; with the consequence that Reb Monash was still wrapped in his afternoon doze. Mrs. Massel had by this time cleared away every vestige of the mid-day meal and the kitchen was smelling delightfully fresh and clean. The brasses on the mantelshelf shone broad and lustrous--trays and samovar brought over from Russia, and the array of candlesticks which glorified the table every Sabbath eve. The floor had been energetically scrubbed and the windows so polished as to seduce into the kitchen whatever light lingered beyond the iron bars. On the sofa sat Mrs. Massel herself, in a clean afternoon apron, her fingers busy with knitting, allowing herself in Philip's honour the few minutes she spent idly in a day which began at six in the morning and ended at eleven. Mrs. Massel was a woman of middle age, slim, but her whole body eloquent of hard work. When Reb Monash had gone to seek his rhetorical fortunes in America, before Philip was born, she had tried to combine the housework with some form of itinerant business; the strain was still visible in the long lines across her forehead. Her face was small and wrinkled and superficially older than her actual years. When, however, she smiled, the clouds of her sorrow and tiredness seemed to chase each other out of the skies of her face. She was then wistful and childish as one to whom the world still had all her tragedies to reveal. Her nose was a little too broad for the small lines of her face, and this only added to her smile an element of the elfin and unreal, as if she had been instructed in some wisdom of dim mirth by little people far beyond the circle of her recurrent drudgeries. This childlike sweetness lay in her eyes even in repose; for they seemed large and luminous with some inner steady light, they were brown like hill tarns when autumn is on the bracken slopes round them. On her smiling this light seemed to be broken into little ripples which coursed over the brown waters of her eyes; but a surprise and a doubt at no time deserted them, as if beyond the horizon clouds lay ever waiting to veil these brown lights with mist.