So the poor ugly duckling who had failed to accomplish anything went home to its family of swans, who, dazzlingly white, cut circles in the air above it on the pinions of their various accomplishments. There was Arthur, now nineteen, who had got an Eton scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, and was going there in October, whose scholastic success was only equalled by his volleys with an Eton football and his wholly untakeable service at lawn-tennis. He could do everything with ease, was listened to by my father with attention when he talked, and yet remained unconscious of his sovereignty, and was altogether kind and faintly pitiful to my all-round shortcomings. There was Nellie, who annexed every distinction that could be annexed at the Truro High School, except when Maggie butted up against her, who could play Schumann’s first novelette and had been pronounced to have a “veiled” contralto voice in which she sang melodies by Marzials and Molloy, and who, on the occasion of Redruth High School or some inferior congregation of females challenging Truro High School for a match at cricket, bowled out the entire side of those misguided young ladies with lobs that cut the daisies from their stalks and were admired even by the vanquished for their paralyzing swiftness. Then there was Maggie, who took the rest of the prizes at the High School and painted ravishly not only in water-colours, but in oils, with McGuilp (was it?) as a medium, and tubes that squirted rainbows on to her palette. She was not athletic, but she had the great physical distinction of having been knocked down by a cow whose calf had been taken from her, and lying prone on the ground held on to the animal’s horns and with perfect calmness continued to scream loudly and serenely until rescued by Parker the butler. After these dazzling swans there came the ugly duckling, who had failed in games and in scholarship, who had not achieved the smallest intellectual distinction, but who in some queer manner of his own was quite as independent as any of the swans.