If he is caught cribbing he is concerned only with his immediate punishment. If some one gets his colours before him it does not matter. He has done with the troubles of seniority. The old life is falling from him. He is perplexed, not seeing clearly what lies in front of him. Six years seemed such a long time. He had not paused to wonder what lay beyond them. He had come to regard that last Sunday in the school chapel as a final stage. School stories always ended there: in the same way that romances always closed on marriage, or on death. And, though now he would be no doubt ready to admit that a man's life did not end at the altar, and might even be prepared to consider the possibility of an existence beyond the grave, he had not considered such speculation profitable or entertaining. And, in the same way that at a later point of his career he will awake with a start six months after marriage and ask himself whether it is all over: 'Heavens!' he will say, 'I can't be finished with; what's going to happen now?' So, during his last term, he discovers that this stage has not the finality he had supposed. Something has got to happen next. School life was, after all, no more than a prelude. He had valued too highly the enticing emoluments it had to offer. And he does not see what new prizes life will hold for him. If he is going to Oxford he may toy with the prospect of athletic honours. But unless he is particularly gifted, or particularly conceited, he will appreciate the vast degree of specialised rivalry to which he will be subjected. If he is going into business he will envisage, perhaps, the days of affluence and power, of private secretaries and private telephones; but all that is a very long way off. There is no immediate focus for his ambition. There is no particular reason why he should not, if he wishes, make as big a nuisance of himself as his fancy pleases. He is passing from one phase of discipline to another; and because the nature of neither is definite, he considers himself free. A last term is often indeterminate and ineffectual.