ing eyes in
them. There was a continuous roar that rose and fell like the sea. But I
neither saw nor heeded. I just ran and ran.

On the home-stretch a fellow came breast to breast with me. It was
Learoyd ... running low like a swallow skimming the ground. But it
didn't worry me. I was calm, just floating along, it seemed to me.

I saw Dunn throwing his camera into the air, in the forefront of the
seething crowd. He was crying for me to come on. The camera fell in a
smashed heap, unregarded.

Barely, with my chest flung out, I took the tape ... trailing off ... I
ran half a lap more, with my class leaping grotesquely and shouting,
streaming across field after me--before I had my senses back again, and
realised that the race was over.

"Did I win? Did I win? Did I win?" I asked again and again.

"Yes, you won!"

I was being carried about on their shoulders.

"A little more, and we'd have to take you over to the hospital,"
commented Smythe, as he looked at me, while I lay prone on my back,
resting, under shelter of the tent.

"Who--who used up all this witch-hazel?" he asked of the rubbers....

I hid my face in the grass, pretending to groan from the strain I had
just undergone. Instead, I was smothering a laugh at myself ... at the
school ... at all things....

"God and witch-hazel," I wanted to shout hysterically, "hurrah for God
and witch-hazel."

Then I rose shakily to my feet, and, flinging myself loose from those
who offered to help me, I ran at a good clip, in my sneakers, dangling
my running shoes affectionately--to my solitary room ... with a bearing
that boasted, "why, I could run all those three races over again, one
right after the other, right now ... no, I'm not tired ... not the least
bit tired!"

That night, in the crowded dining hall, the ovation for me was
tremendous.

"I'll smash life just like those races," I boasted, in my heart.

But my triumph and eminence were not to last long.

To be looked up to at Mt. Hebron you had to lead a distasteful,
colourless life of hypocrisy and piety such as I have seldom seen
anywhere before. Under cover of their primitive Christianity I never
found more pettiness. First, you prayed and hymn-sung yourself into
favour, and then indulged in sanctimonious intrigue to keep yourself
where you had arrived.

I could not stand my half self-hypnotised hypocrisy any longer. A spirit
of mischief and horseplay awoke in me. I perpetrated a hundred
misdemeanou