In point of fact, ‘swelldom’ (like some other highly coveted human distinctions) consists not so much in the possession of privileges as in the general belief that those privileges are possessed by the ‘swells.’ Mysterious indeed, except to the initiated, are the outward and visible signs of ‘swelldom,’ but not less mysterious is the fact of ‘swelldom’ itself. At St. Anselm’s (for of that school only is it necessary to speak) there were some boys who became ‘swells’ by prescriptive title, such as the captain of the school, and the boys of a year’s standing in the cricket and football elevens. About them no question could arise in any well-ordered mind. But a number of other boys there were who stood, as it were, on the borderline of ‘swell-land.’ They might or might not at any time be privileged to cross the border. Until or unless they could cross it, they were like the spirits which Dante saw in the first circle of his ‘Inferno.’ How a boy came to cross the border, he himself could hardly explain. But as a boy spends many days perhaps, or weeks, trying to swim, and all but swimming, and then one day, without any direct assignable cause, feels that he can swim, so a boy might aspire to ‘swelldom,’ and live close to it for ever so long a time and be excluded from it, and then at last wake up some morning and feel that he was a ‘swell,’ like the great poet who awoke to find himself famous. Harry Venniker had been a ‘swell’ for a long time, ever since the term in which he ‘got his flannels.’ So good an athlete, so popular a boy was admitted to the charmed circle as of right. Gerald Eversley, it will be believed, had never dreamed of ‘swelldom;’ the ‘swells’ were the last boys with whom he would naturally associate. But it was the practice of the ‘swells’ to co-opt occasionally, though only on rare occasions, some boy who, by his position or character or attainments, might be thought not incapable of shedding lustre even upon their distinguished order. Gerald Eversley was now the third boy in the school. He was acknowledged to be the cleverest boy. He had won the school a holiday by winning the Balliol scholarship--and he was Harry Venniker’s friend. The ‘swells’ were divided in opinion about co-opting him into their order. Some of them had hardly spoken to him, and doubted how they should get on with him. Others thought that he was ‘the kind of fellow to be encouraged.’ But it was Harry Venniker’s warm support that carried the day; Gerald Eversley might be passed over, but Harry Venniker’s friend could not. It was intimated to Gerald, according to the mysterious freemasonry of public-school life, that he might consider himself as exalted (not altogether through his own merit) to the august hierarchy of the ‘swells.’