He read the letter through three times before finishing with it; then, sitting forward on the old wooden bench scarred with a thousand penknives, he went over the delicious details of it. How exactly Uncle Samuel realized the things that he would want to know! No one else in the family wrote about anything that was exciting or intriguing. Uncle Samuel managed in some way to make you see things. The studio, the sky with the little moon, the red apples, Hamlet flat on the floor, his head rigid, his eyes fixed; Aunt Amy shopping in Drymouth, Barbara tumbling downstairs. That whole world came towards him and filled the playground and blotted out the school, so that for a moment school life was unreal, shadowy, and did not matter. He sighed with happy contentment. Young though he was, he realized that great truth that one person in the world is quite enough. One human being who understands your strange mixture equalizes five million who think you are simply black, white or purple. All you want is to be reassured about your own suspicions of yourself. A devoted dog is almost enough, and one friend ample. Jeremy went in to dinner with his head in the air, trailing after him, like Peter Pan, one shadow of the world immediately around him, the world in which the school sergeant was carving the mutton at the end of the table so ferociously that it might have been the corpse of his dearest enemy, and the masters at the high table were getting fried potatoes and the boys only boiled, and Jeremy was not having even those because he had got to play football in an hour’s time; and the other world, where there was Aunt Amy’s eyelash high in the air, and the cathedral bells ringing, and Uncle Samuel painting cows. Jeremy would have liked to consider the strange way in which these two worlds refused to mingle, to have developed the idea of Uncle Samuel carving the mutton instead of the sergeant, and the sergeant watching the evening sky instead of Uncle Samuel, and why it was that these two things were so impossible! His attention was occupied by the fact that Plummy Smith, who was a fat boy, was sitting in his wrong place and making a “squash” on Jeremy’s side of the table, which led quite naturally to the game of trying to squeeze Plummy from both ends of the table into a purple mass, and to do it without Thompson noticing. Little pathetic squeals came from Plummy, who loved his food, and saw his mutton mysteriously whisked away on to some other plate, and knew that he would be hungry all the afternoon in consequence. He was one of those boys who had on the first day of his arrival, a year earlier, unfortunately confided to those whom he thought his friends that he lived with two aunts, Maria and Alice. His fate was sealed from the moment of that unfortunate confidence. He did not know it, and he had been in puzzled bewilderment ever since as to why the way of life was made so hard for him. He meant no one any harm, and could