Ishmael was casting aside much these days.  He was at that expanding age which accepts what it is taught as good, but thinks it fine to throw it over.  Later comes the age of thinking for oneself and concluding that whatever one has been taught is bad.  Curiously enough the outward result of the two states is the same.  Only later comes the period of judicious sifting, and by then characteristics, tastes, habits, have unwittingly formed such bias that true poise is almost unattainable.  Ishmael’s root-ideas were unchanged, but he conformed to all the fads of the school, even, as he became more of a personage, adding to them, for his inborn dread of ridicule prevented him from being an iconoclast and his bent for dominance made some action, one way or the other, necessary.  The Parson sank more and more into the background, but there came over the rim of his world a new figure that, oddly enough, filled much the same place.

On that first night at school, when the Parson had gone back home and Ishmael lay in a narrow little bed, one of ten such, in the darkened dormitory, he shed no tears for the Parson, or for his old companions, nor yet for the strangeness of the new world where he might, in the reaction from the first excitement, have been feeling lonely.  He was too solidly set on getting all that was possible out of his fresh life.  But in his most curious searchings into the likely future as he lay that night for an hour or so upon a wakeful pillow, he did not picture anything as delightful as, in after years, he was to realise Hilaria Eliot had been for those boys who at the time so casually and unthinkingly enjoyed her wayward companionship.

CHAPTER X

HILARIA

“Point the toe, if you please young gentlemen; slide well forward and bow to your partner from the waist....  Ruan, you have the air of a poker trying to be graceful.  Watch Killigrew and do as he does.  Now, all together please ...”; and the row of self-conscious boys bowed, gloved hands upon severely jacketed chests, while as many little girls, aware of doing the thing correctly and of not looking fools in the doing of it, spread white tarletan skirts in starchy semi-circles by way of reply.

It was the weekly dancing class, when Mr. Pierre Sebastian Eliot, who on other days taught French at the Grammar School, undertook to instruct the boys in what he referred to as “the divine art of Terpsichore,” a habit which had earned for himself the simple nickname of “Terps.”  The class was held in a spacious room used for balls, both subscription and private, at the “George” Inn, and to it came not only those Grammar School boys whose parents paid for this polite “extra,” but also the maidens from the gentle families of St. Renny and the neighbourhood.

Ishmael was dancing opposite Hilaria Eliot, and his enjoyment of it lay in knowing that Killigrew, who had basely tried to trip him up shortly before, was suffering pangs of envy.  After some four years of knowing her, Killigrew was suddenly in love with Miss Eliot and didn’t mind who knew it.  In fact, to be accurate, Killigrew’s emotion was chiefly based on a desire to be different from the rest of his world, and what was the good of being different unless people knew it?