Now if the discovery that school life is only a prelude is made by an unimaginative athlete during these last weeks, we can confidently assume that it will be made a good deal sooner by a boy of originality and independence, especially by one who has not entered with any great zest into the conflict of athletic distinction, and has, therefore, been in a sense above the battle. He realises a good year and a half before he has to leave that life in its fullest is to be encountered beyond the limits of a cloistered world. The discovery does not contribute to his content. He knows that if he wishes to win a scholarship he will have to stay on his full time, and he feels that he is marking time, that he is sitting in the stalls of a theatre waiting for the curtain to go up. Now that is a most unsatisfactory position to be in. In the theatre we kick our heels, read our programmes, turn round to see if we can recognise a friend, speculate on the possibility of innocence in the lady who is sitting in the front row of the dress circle. One does anything to make the quarter of an hour pass quickly. The imaginative schoolboy behaves in a similar fashion. He frets and grows impatient. He assumes an intellectual snobbery. He despises the majority of his companions and labels them as Philistines. He disparages the values of athletics and exalts in essays and in the debating society the literary standards of the nineties. It is possible that on Saturday evening he will leave a carnation standing in green ink in the hope of emulating his divinities. He is encouraged in his rebellion by the indignant astonishment of the master, who refuses to regard his outburst as a very natural and, on the whole, harmless pose. He is lectured severely on the dignity of his position. He replies in a cryptic epigram. He even criticises the public school system--an unforgivable offence. Being unacquainted with the ways of systems, and feeling that his personal liberty is curtailed, he considers that for this curtailment the public school system is solely and peculiarly responsible. He will not allow that all systems oppress the individual, that systems are made for the service of the many, and that it is for the individualist to decide whether the privileges he will receive by consenting to remain with the mass compensate for the unpleasant restrictions that are placed on the free play of his personality. It is, after all, the first system with which he has contracted an intimate relationship, and in the same way that a monogamist considers his wife worse than anybody else's, the schoolboy delights, in spite of a deep affection for his own school, in hurling at the public school system all manner of accusations, in which the word sausage machine is not infrequently repeated.