obese, easily roused and as easily calmed, and his boys soon discovered
that there was much kindliness beneath the invective with which he
constantly assailed them. He had no patience with fools, but was willing
to take much trouble with boys whom he suspected of concealing
intelligence behind their wilfulness. He was fond of inviting them to tea;
and, though vowing they never got a look in with him at the cakes and
muffins, for it was the fashion to believe that his corpulence pointed to
a voracious appetite, and his voracious appetite to tapeworms, they
accepted his invitations with real pleasure.

Philip was now more comfortable, for space was so limited that there were
only studies for boys in the upper school, and till then he had lived in
the great hall in which they all ate and in which the lower forms did
preparation in a promiscuity which was vaguely distasteful to him. Now and
then it made him restless to be with people and he wanted urgently to be
alone. He set out for solitary walks into the country. There was a little
stream, with pollards on both sides of it, that ran through green fields,
and it made him happy, he knew not why, to wander along its banks. When he
was tired he lay face-downward on the grass and watched the eager
scurrying of minnows and of tadpoles. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction
to saunter round the precincts. On the green in the middle they practised
at nets in the summer, but during the rest of the year it was quiet: boys
used to wander round sometimes arm in arm, or a studious fellow with
abstracted gaze walked slowly, repeating to himself something he had to
learn by heart. There was a colony of rooks in the great elms, and they
filled the air with melancholy cries. Along one side lay the Cathedral
with its great central tower, and Philip, who knew as yet nothing of
beauty, felt when he looked at it a troubling delight which he could not
understand. When he had a study (it was a little square room looking on a
slum, and four boys shared it), he bought a photograph of that view of the
Cathedral, and pinned it up over his desk. And he found himself taking a
new interest in what he saw from the window of the Fourth Form room. It
looked on to old lawns, carefully tended, and fine trees with foliage
dense and rich. It gave him an odd feeling in his heart, and he did not
know if it was pain or pleasure. It was the first dawn of the aesthetic
emotion. It accompanied other changes. His voi