He was singularly friendless. His schoolmates had gone into offices and regarded with strange and rather alarmed eyes his continued pursuit of academic courses, and in his first years at the university he had undergone a violent spasm of mental growth which had left him shy and diffident, resentful of anything that seemed like intrusion upon his brooding, and impatient of surface relationships and the too easy friendliness which he saw current on all sides. Also he was chafed by his position of semi-dependence upon his relations, and rather scared by the possibility of not doing well enough in his examinations to justify what was constantly being impressed upon him as his exceptional opportunity. Therefore he worked on a time-table in term and out of it, never less than nine hours a day; morning, afternoon, and evening; and rather harder in vacation than in term. He had no smallest notion what it was all for. He had an unusual faculty for learning things and arrangements of ideas, and could always answer examination questions lucidly, and had so small a conceit of himself that his work was never spoiled by a nervous anxiety to excel nor interfered with by the emotionalism of the clever young. He had a sound, all-round ability, never expected anything to be difficult, and could quickly master the elements of any study he took up. When that study led away from practical considerations he was apt to lose interest in it. He had stopped short of philosophy and pure mathematics, and the astuteness of his headmaster had led him in his last year at school to specialize in history and economics. When he was sent up for a scholarship at Cambridge, he failed because the beauty of the Backs had so stirred his rather sluggish emotions as to cause him temporarily to lose his lucidity and shrewdness in dealing with examination questions, so that he wrote rather at large--thoroughly enjoying himself--than with particular reference to the matter in hand. However, he had already won a County Council Scholarship, and with this he entered Thrigsby University. There he had done well and had picked up exhibitions and bursaries, striving for success not so much because he wanted it, as because it was expected of him. He lived now in a strange disquietude, reading his set books, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marshall, Cannan, Jevons, various works by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, amusing himself with the advanced diagrammatic economists, and grinding away at his special subject, Coöperation, from the Rochdale pioneers to the European "movement." All this he did mechanically. His brain had been set going in a certain direction by amiable instructors whom he had never seen any reason to doubt, and it was pleasant to let it go on so moving toward that examination which was to be a gate leading to a profession higher than the life of commerce from which he had been reclaimed.