It was shortly before tea on the first day of term that John met his colleague. Gerald Woodman, a scholar of St. John's College, Oxford, was tall and heavily built for his twenty-five years. He appeared much older because of his great reserve and a perpetual melancholy. He had dark hair and dark eyes, an enormous appetite and no sentiment. In his short life he had arrived at a creed of absolute cynicism. He talked with reluctance, but John found later that at heart he was a good fellow whose foibles were the inheritance of a period of religious mania. He was now a robust atheist. The Church no longer seemed a desirable refuge; he had become a schoolmaster. Although fourteen stone in weight, he was possessed by a fear of starvation and deplored his thinness; when in cricket flannels, his thighs wobbled so much that all the boys grinned, but even this did not reassure him. John had recently passed through the brief pimply period inseparable from youth, and in desperation one day bought a bottle containing five hundred blood pills. As if alarmed at the prospect, the pimples immediately disappeared. Mr. Woodman saw the pills on John's dressing table and asked if he might have a few to set his blood in order. John gave him them. Those pills probably saved the first assistant master from a second nervous breakdown. He swallowed five after each meal and declared with deep satisfaction that he was putting on weight; he was optimistic until the bottle was finished, when his habitual melancholy returned. Their first evening at Chawley School was spent in a conference with the Head-master who drew up the curriculum. The hours were arranged between them. John received one afternoon per week off duty and the alternate Sundays. The class hours were 8:30 a.m. to 11, a break of half an hour during which they supervised games, then 11:30 to 1 p.m. An hour for lunch, then work until 3 p.m. Games followed until five, a period during which John changed into football shorts and raced about the field in a scrimmage of shouting boys. He enjoyed this and quite forgot all his woes. Tea was at five, a blessed interval of one hour's peace, then school again until 7:30, when the boys went up to bed. Dinner, in the household apartments, with Mrs. Tobin in an evening gown and facetiously cheerful, was at eight. After dinner the two masters left the rosy warmth of the dining room for their own bare quarters, where the interval between dinner and bedtime was spent in the correction of the day's exercise books; a monotonous routine, dulling the senses, and demoralizing human beings with its hopelessness. There was no sense of advancement. The end of the term came slowly, then the holidays, then term again, with the same subjects to drill into the same reluctant little boys.