He won the prize; staggered across the platform of the Free Trade Hall with a Gibbon in six sumptuous volumes, calf-bound, stamped with the school arms; he rode “in triumph through Persepolis,” and thought that it was “sweet and full of pomp;” then, when it was over and the last “Gaudeamus” of that Speech Day had been sung and the last cheers for the holidays (always the heartiest) been given, he sought his mother in the crowd. “Well?” said Sam, who had kept this glory as a surprise for her. “Aye,” said Anne, “but it might be better. You’ve won a prize and you’re forgiven, but you know well enough that you’ve diddled me. I wanted a prize to show that you’d the gift of learning, and you’ve won one to show that you’ve the gift of the gab. I knew it already,” she ended dryly, “and you’re nobbut tenth out of the twenty-four in your class. Will they move you up?” She dissembled the genuine pride with which she had seen him cross that platform and take his bulky prize, because she felt inly that the chief talent Sam had proved was a talent for deception. This was a prize, but she thought it too barely within the meaning of the act: it observed the letter of his bargain and eluded the spirit. She did him less than justice. The average hoy came to school knowing English; Sam had had to learn it, and here was proof, in a prize won against the whole school and not merely against a form, that he had learned his lesson well. Her disparagement depressed him. He had not reached, and with a mother like Anne he could not at his age reach, the healthy younger generation’s contempt for the opinions of its elders. He felt weakened in his belief in the social and economical value of a decent accent and grew careless in preserving it. His Gibbon lay upon his shelf unread, an empty glory, and, in the event, his prize was to lead to a calamity. It was to lead, indirectly, to Tom Branstone’s death. Sam found himself, after the holidays, moved up to the Transitus, the last boy to be moved there from the Fifth. He was not sure that it pleased him. Left in the Fifth he might have been a Triton among the minnows: in the Transitus he was incurably a minnow. But he discovered there an atmosphere to which he might have responded better than he did. Discipline was slacker; one had reached the ante-room to the Sixth and was assumed to be serious; one had the privilege of a form-room which was open in the lunch-hour so that one had not to wait with smaller fry in the corridors; and, above all, the form-master was a gentleman as well as a scholar. He was not blind to these advantages, but he did not, somehow, “come on” with his classics. The terrible facility of Bull and Adams was a constant discouragement: mere perseverance was outvied by natural ability and dragged its leaden weight behind. He knew himself incapable of shining in this company, and gave up a losing fight the more readily because the half-term brought a new diversion, and a chance to coruscate.