what they
were--infant savages discontented with food, weather and education.

I will not detail the incidents of that morning. The episodes that were
on other mornings games were today tortures. There was the Torture of
Losing Things, the Torture of Not Hearing, the Torture of Many Noises,
the Torture of Sudden Alarm, the Torture of Outright Defiance, the
Torture of Expressed Contempt. When twelve struck and the children were
free, Miss Jones was not far from a nervous panic that can be called,
without any exaggeration, incipient madness. The neuralgia tore at her
brain, her own self-contempt tore at her heart, her baffled impotence
bewildered and blinded her. She did not leave the schoolroom with the
children, but went to the broad window-sill and sat there looking out
into the dreary prospect. Then, suddenly for no reason except general
weakness and physical and spiritual collapse she began to cry.

Jeremy was considered to have a cold, and was, therefore, not permitted
to accompany his mother and sisters on an exciting shopping expedition,
which would certainly lead as far as old Poole's, the bookseller, and
might even extend to Martins', the pastrycook, who made lemon biscuits
next door to the Cathedral. He was, therefore, in a very bad temper
indeed when he returned sulkily to the schoolroom. He stood for a moment
there unaware that there was anybody in the room, hesitating as to
whether he should continue "A Flat Iron for a Farthing" or hunt up
Hamlet. Suddenly he heard the sound of sobbing. He turned and saw Miss
Jones.

He would have fled had flight been in any way possible, but she had
looked up and seen him, and her sudden arrested sniff held them both
there as though by some third invisible power. He saw that she was
crying; he saw her red nose, mottled cheeks, untidy hair. It was the
most awful moment of his young life. He had never seen a grown-up person
cry before; he had no idea that they ever did cry. He had, indeed, never
realised that grown-up persons had any active histories at all, any
histories in the sense in which he and Mary had them. They were all a
background, simply a background that blew backwards and forwards like
tapestry according to one's need of them. His torture of Miss Jones had
been founded on no sort of realisation of her as a human being; she
had been a silly old woman, of course, but just as the battered
weather-beaten Aunt Sally in the garden was a silly old woman.

Her cryin