o you remember the girl, my dear?" he asked, turning
to his wife.

"Yes," murmured Lady Masters.

"Well, then," continued Sir John, "you must imagine this Morton, an ugly
little boy of twelve, going up on a scholarship to a great public
school--a rather bitter little boy, without any particular prospects
ahead of him except those his scholarship held out; and back of him a
poor, stunted life, with a mother in it--a sad dehumanized creature, I
gathered, who subsisted on the bounty of a niggardly brother. And this,
you can understand, was the first thing that made Morton hate virtue
devoid of strength. His mother, he told me, was the best woman he had
ever known. The world had beaten her unmercifully. His earliest
recollection was hearing her cry at night.... And there, at the school,
he had his first glimpse of the great world that up to then he had only
dimly suspected. Dramatic enough in itself, isn't it?--if you can
visualize the little dark chap. A common enough drama, too, the Lord
knows. We people on top are bequeathing misery to our posterity when we
let the Mortons of the world hate the rich. And head and shoulders above
the other boys of his age at the school was Bewsher; not that
materially, of course, there weren't others more important; Bewsher's
family was old and rich as such families go, but he was very much a
younger son, and his people lived mostly in the country; yet even then
there was something about him--a manner, an adeptness in sports, an
unsought popularity, that picked him out; the beginnings of that Norman
nose that Mr. Burnaby has mentioned. And here"--Sir John paused and
puffed thoughtfully at his cigarette--"is the first high light.

"To begin with, of course, Morton hated Bewsher and all he represented,
hated him in a way that only a boy of his nature can; and then, one
day--I don't know exactly when it could have been, probably a year or
two after he had gone up to school--he began to see quite clearly what
this hate meant; began to see that for such as he to hate the Bewshers
of the world was the sheerest folly--a luxury far beyond his means.
Quaint, wasn't it? In a boy of his age! You can imagine him working it
out at night, in his narrow dormitory bed, when the other boys were
asleep. You see, he realized, dimly at first, clearly at last, that
through Bewsher and his kind lay the hope of Morton and his kind. Nice
little boys think the same thing, only they are trained not to admit
it.