ch, though
the Byronic mood has gone out of fashion, will never go out of fashion
so long as there is youthful pride to be wounded, and patient merit
has to accept the spurns of the unworthy. No, perhaps the adjective is
mistaken, if Shakespeare ever was mistaken; not patient, but exasperated
merit, conscious to the very finger points of its own deserts.

Warrender was well enough aware that he could, if he chose, make up the
lost way and leave Brunson "nowhere" in the race for honours; but it was
his first disenchantment, and he felt it deeply. Letters are dear and
honours sweet, but our own beloved personality is dearer still; and there
is no one who does not feel humbled and wounded when he finds out that
he is esteemed, not for himself, but for what he can do,--and poor Theo
was only twenty, and had been made much of all his life. He began to ask
himself, too, whether his past popularity, the pleasant things that had
been always said of him, the pleasant way in which his friendship had
been sought, were perhaps all inspired by the same motive,--because he
was likely to do credit to his belongings and friends. It is a fine
thing to do credit to your belongings, to be the pride of your community,
to be quoted to future generations as the hero of the past. This was
what had occurred to him at school, and he had liked it immensely.
Warrender had been a word to conjure withal, named by lower boys with
awe, fondly cherished in the records of Sixth Form. But the glimmer in
the Head Master's eye as he said good-bye, the little falter in his
tutor's voice,--did these mean no more than an appreciation of his
progress, and an anticipation of the honour and glory he was to bring
them at the university, a name to fling in the teeth of the newspaper
fellows next time they demanded what were the results of the famous
public school system? This thought had a sort of maddening effect upon
the fastidious, hot-headed, impatient young man. He flung his books
into a corner of the room, and covered them over with a yellow cairn of
railway novels. If that was all, there let them lie. He resolved that
nothing would induce him to touch them more.

The result was--but why should we dwell upon the result? It sent a
shiver through the college, where there were some faithful souls who
still believed that Warrender could pick up even at the last moment,
if he liked. It produced such a sensation in his old school as relaxed
discipline entirely,