Woodman's theory, nevertheless, was not strictly applied. He was firm with his boys, made them work hard and was a martinet in detail, but he was a sportsman and the boys responded to his sense of fair play. As for John, by the third day of term, he was devoted to them, although hating more and more the dreary routine of his life. It was fascinating to study this dozen or so of young lives given into his keeping, to note the amazing divergence of character which manifested itself so early. John found himself looking through them to the parents beyond. He had a perfect index to the home life and the characters that had influenced them. The generous boy and the greedy, the frank and the secretive, the imaginative and the stolid, the sharp and the dull, the graceful, the strong, the quick, the ugly, the slow, the boy of bright honour, and the boy with a tendency to deceit, the potential coward or hero--they were all here in embryo. Education after all was only a wind that could bend the branches, it could not change the nature of the plant. II At the end of the first week, John was in a highly nervous condition. The monotony of the work, the regularity of the hours, the seclusion in a small world, the absence of all friends and his isolation miles away from all who knew him and with whom he could talk intimately, preyed upon his mind until one evening he reached a point of frenzy. He banged down a pile of exercise books, kicked a cushion vigorously, and then swore at the wall, from the other side of which came sounds of a small boy practising Czerny's One Hundred and One Exercises for the pianoforte. Woodman watched this outburst of wild rage with amusement. "Beat your wings, my poor little moth! You will soon tire and subside--we have all passed along that _via dolorosa_," he commented. "It is unendurable!" cried John, flinging himself in a chair. "The capacity of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortu--" "Oh, shut up!" snapped John. Woodman regarded him sympathetically. He had grown to like this bright lad, so freshly enthusiastic, and bit by bit he had learned his story. In exchange he had shown John some of the poetry which he wrote secretly. Strangely enough it was highly sentimental, the safety valve of suppressed romanticism.