“Who’s that letter from? . . . Girl?” said Griffin rudely.
“A lady.”
“What!”
“My mother.”
“Christ! Your mother isn’t a lady, or she wouldn’t have married a chemist . . . or be your mother.”
And then Edwin jumped up, overturning the form on which he had been sitting, and lashed out at Griffin’s face. He wanted to smash the freckled thing. He only caught the boy’s cheek with the flat of his hand, and then, after a second of dazed wonder at his own achievement, he rushed out of Big School, across the Quad, and up that white, dust-felted road to the downs.
CHAPTER II
GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY
I
Of course he got his thrashing in return; but, in the end, he found himself the gainer by that unthinkable outburst. The incident had been noted, and there were those who relished the blow to Griffin’s prestige, a blow which no recriminatory lickings could efface. Edwin assured himself that he had that day lighted such a candle in England as should never be put out. It seemed, indeed, as though the affair had revealed to some of his own classmates that intellectual superiority which they had overlooked before; and, in particular, it made the basis of a friendship between himself and one of his rivals, a boy named Widdup, who combined with a head for mathematics—Edwin’s blank despair—a certain proficiency in games. Widdup disliked Griffin.
“Great beefy beast,” he said. “If they’d make him play footer and sweat some of the fat off him he’d have been a bit quicker on you. He wasn’t half waxy about it. He hates being laughed at. . . .”