d
the first time he heard himself called by that name he blushed as deeply
as if his most intimate privacy had suddenly been violated. In a few
hours, however, the unfamiliarity of the name as a standing appellation
had worn off, and then the pride of the thing sent a pleasant glow
through his whole body, making him for a brief, dizzy moment glimpse the
glory of manhood.

His next discovery went far deeper. He had attended school four years in
succession, but only as you drop into a strange room on a visit. He had
never belonged in or to the school, and the school had neither limited
nor extended his individuality. Now he found himself completely taken
possession of and made a part of something larger than himself, a
carefully correlated and guarded system of ranks and rules and
traditions. In retrospect the former school seemed as accidental and
fleeting as a street crowd, while the new one was an institution with a
jealously preserved and deeply revered history to which each new pupil
was expected to add more lustre. But most remarkable of all seemed the
fact that this collective body added something to the stature of every
boy that became a part of it.

Membership was as onerous as it was honourable, not only within the
school precints but anywhere. To belong to "Old Mary" was to carry a
sacred duty along wherever one went. She was like an ambitious parent,
never jealous of the reputation of her children. Mostly it was a
question of refraining from this or that thing which less conspicuously
placed boys might venture at will, but at times it might imply the
performance of fierce deeds of bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.
There was the rival school of St. Catherine and several "popular"
schools that had no social standing whatsoever, but contained pupils
with harder fists and less generous ideas of fighting than any boy
within Old Mary. When certain words of derision were flung upon the air
by members of those inferior institutions, there was nothing left for a
pupil of St. Mary's but to fight.

Little by little these strange facts penetrated Keith's subconsciousness
and set up a never ending conflict between pride and precaution, between
his wish to rise to a new ideal and his instinctive tendency to obey his
mother's almost hysterical injunctions against fighting of any kind.
Fortunately his road to and from school permitted him to follow the
principal streets where the traffic was sufficient to act as a