Uncle Henry ended with an air of having closed the discussion, and, after some friendly meditation, whose results were flung out in the fashion of men too used to each other's habit of thought to need elaborate intercourse, Mr. Paragon rose and went thoughtfully home. By the time he reached the Kidderminster Road he had definitely settled the question of Peter's career. Peter should get knowledge. He should possess the inner fortress of learning. He should be the perfect knight of the oppressed people, armed at all points. Thus did Mr. Paragon reconcile his Radical prejudices with his fatherly ambition. Arrived home, he showed the headmaster's letter to Mrs. Paragon. She read it with the pride of a mother who knows the worth of her boy, but nevertheless likes it to be acknowledged. Mr. Paragon watched her as she read. "Yes," he said, answering her thoughts, "Peter's all right." Mrs. Paragon handed back the letter. "I suppose," suggested Mr. Paragon, airily magnificent, "he had better go on with his education?" "Of course," said Mrs. Paragon. Mr. Paragon knew at once that if he had persisted in taking Peter from school he would have had to persuade his wife that it was right to do so. He also knew that this would have been very difficult. Fortunately, however, he had decided otherwise. He could flatter himself now that he had settled this grave question himself. It was true, in a sense, that he had. Mr. Paragon had not for nothing lived with his wife for nearly seventeen years. VI Peter was not happy at the High School. It is disconcerting, when you have been First Boy and a Captain, to be put among inferior creatures to learn Greek. Peter had risen with his former friends from the lowest to the highest; they had grown together in sport and learning. Now he found himself in a middle form, an interloper among cliques already established. Moreover, the boys at the High School, where education for such as could not obtain a foundation scholarship was more expensive than at the lower branches, were of a superior quality, with nicer manners and a more delicate way of speaking. He was a stranger. At sixteen Peter was almost a man. His father had always met him upon an intellectual equality. They had talked upon the gravest matters. Peter had voraciously read a thousand books which he did not altogether understand. It needed only physical adolescence to show him how far he had outstripped the friends of his age. The lot of a precocious boy is not a happy one, and Peter paid the penalty. He made not a single friend during his two years at the new school. He lived gravely after his own devices, quiet, observant, superficially accessible to the kind advances of his masters and classfellows, but profoundly unaffected.