This isolation, except for purposes of chastisement, weighed heavily on Edwin. He didn’t wish to be different from others, although he felt that his mind was somehow of a painfully foreign texture. He knew that things somehow struck him differently . . . but he was so far from taking this as a mark of superiority that he was heartily ashamed of it. His whole ambition was towards the normal; he tried vigorously to suppress imagination, humour, all the inconvenient things with which he had been cursed; to starve them, to destroy them. He became studious of the ways of normality. Griffin and the noble Douglas were handy exemplars; Layton, the head of the house, an unattainable ideal. Layton, indeed, was something of a variant; but Layton, by means of his slim skull’s capacity for retaining facts and an ingratiating piety, had passed beyond the pale of everyday endeavour. Edwin longed to be normal, and they wouldn’t let him. He cultivated assiduously the use of the fashionable slang; and that, of course, was easy. He whipped up an interest in outdoor games; played his very hardest in the ordinary house football, and even volunteered to take part in the Soccer games organised on fag-days for small boys by Mr. Selby, who nursed a lazy grudge against the Rugby Code. “The Miserable Weeds,” they were called, enshrining his favourite epithet. But though he plunged out of school every morning to practise place-kicking in the fields before dinner, Ingleby was not destined to shine in sport. His habit of dropping off to sleep between fitful bursts of brilliance almost caused him to be uprooted from Mr. Selby’s plantation of weeds. This didn’t worry him much, because Soccer was not popular; but after two trials in the house third, which the baleful Douglas captained, he was degraded to the scratch side known as Small Boys; and even here the scrum extinguished a talent that might have shone in the three-quarter line. And since he failed in every endeavour to attain normality, whether by devotion to games or by those attempts which he made to prove that he was neither “coxy” nor “pi,” by a retiring manner and a foul tongue, he began to crawl back into his shell, nursing a passionate hatred, not unmixed with envy, for all those people whom he couldn’t hope to be like. And so, in a little time, this dangerous humiliation turned to a sort of pride. It pleased him to count himself their superior even when he was most downtrodden. His form master had recently been boring the class with a little dissertation on Marcus Aurelius. Edwin became a Stoic, spending his days in far corners of the box-room, munching a slowly dwindling store of biscuits. Once Griffin caught him with his locker door open and pinioned him against the benches while Douglas made free with his Petits-Beurres to the rest of the box-room. For such contingencies as this the Emperor’s system of philosophy seemed hardly adequate.