ation or other, _ad majorem
Smelliae gloriam_; they were not to practise the musical art that they
might have a soul-developing aesthetic training, a means of solace,
delight, and self-expression--but that they might "play their piece"
to the casual visitor to the school-room with priggish pride,
expectant of praise; they were not to be Christian for any other
reason than that it was the recommended way to Eternal Bliss and a
Good Time Hereafter--the whole duty of canny and respectable man being
to "save his soul" therefore.

Her charges were skilfully, if unintentionally, trained in hypocrisy
and mean motive, to look for low reward and strive for paltry ends--to
do what looked well, say what sounded well, to be false, veneered,
ungenuine.

And Miss Smellie was giving them the commonly accepted "education" of
their class and kind.

The prize product of the Smellie system was the Haddock whose whole
life was a pose, a lie, a refusal to see the actual. Perhaps she
influenced him more strongly than the others because he was caught
younger and was of weaker fibre. Anyhow he grew up the perfect and
heartless snob, and by the time he left Oxford, he would sooner have
been seen in a Black Maria with Lord Snooker than in a heavenly
chariot with a prophet of unmodish garment and vulgar ancestry.

To the finished Haddock, a tie was more than a character, and the cut
of a coat more than the cutting of a loving heart.

To him a "gentleman" was a person who had the current accent and
waistcoat, a competence, the entree here and there--a goer unto the
correct places with the correct people. Manners infinitely more than
conduct; externals everything; let the whitening be white and the
sepulchre mattered not.

The Haddock had no bloodful vice, but he was unstable as water and
could not excel, a moral coward and weakling, a liar, a borrower of
what he never intended to return, undeniably and incurably mean, the
complete parasite.

From the first he feared and blindly obeyed Miss Smellie, propitiated
while loathing her; accepted her statements, standards, and beliefs;
curried favour and became her spy and informer.

"What's about the record cricket-ball throw, Dam?" inquired Lucille,
as they strolled down the path to the orchard and kitchen-garden,
hot-houses, stream and stables, to seek the coy, reluctant worm.

"Dunno," replied the boy, "but a hundred yards wants a lot of doing."

"Wonder if _I_ could do it," mused Lucille