Husband and wife are sitting after dinner on either side of the fireplace. The wife has just finished reading _The Harrovians_, and she looks up with a puzzled, unhappy look. 'Harold, dear,' she says, 'it's not like that really, is it? If it were true I couldn't think of sending Freddie to such a place.' And what is Harold to say? He has read _The Harrovians_. He knows that substantially it is true, but equally well he knows that if he acknowledges this to his wife his domestic life for the next six years will be complicated by incessant arguments and anxieties. To begin with he will have to spend many evenings of discussion before he can persuade his wife of the advisability of sending Freddie to Rugby. And afterwards there will be constant uneasiness. His wife will fret. She will want to pay visits to Rugby, to interview the head master, to ask her son uncomfortable questions. His own life would become unbearable. And a lie smooths out so much. 'Oh, no, dear, quite unlike the Rugby of my day. An exaggerated picture of a bad house in a bad school, that's all it is.' Such a situation must arise fairly frequently. And at least one instance of it has come within the circle of my own experience. While I was a prisoner in Germany I lent a copy of my school story, _The Loom of Youth_, to a fellow-prisoner, who had expressed a wish to read it. A few days later he returned it to me with such a flattering display of enthusiasm that, in a moment of unusual generosity I promised to send him a copy on our return. The sequel reached me a few days later. He had returned to his room and remarked that Waugh had promised to give him a copy of that book of his, 'the thing that's all full of oaths. I don't know what I shall do with it,' he said. 'I shall have to be jolly careful that my wife doesn't read it.' If one may generalise from such an incident, and I believe that one may, for it has its root in the eternal indolence of human nature, then not only schoolmasters and parents, but fathers and mothers are working at cross purposes. And so the boy finds himself alone, stranded in a society the nature of which he has to discover for himself. He never regards his house-master as one working in co-operation with his parents for the welfare of his soul. Schoolmasters will be to him a separate caste. And although he will never reason this out with himself, he will appreciate it intuitively in the natural cunning with which he will exploit one or the other in the furtherance of his own ends. I do not mean that he is deceitful. But he may want to specialise in History, or to abandon German in favour of Greek, and he will think whether he would do better to approach his father or his house-master. There is a sort of dual monarchy, and if one sovereign is opposed to a favourite scheme, it is but natural to try one's fortune with the other.