His shoelaces were a sad sight, and his finger-nails
no sight at all for a decent woman; his hair was as rough as his
conduct; hardly at the pistol's point could he be forced to put
oil on it. In brief, he was no longer the nice boy that he used to
be. He had unmistakably deteriorated. Grievous! But what can you
expect when YOUR boy is obliged, month after month and year after
year, to associate with other boys? After all, he was a GOOD boy,
said Constance, often to herself and now and then to Samuel. For
Constance, his charm was eternally renewed. His smile, his
frequent ingenuousness, his funny self-conscious gesture when he
wanted to 'get round' her--these characteristics remained; and his
pure heart remained; she could read that in his eyes. Samuel was
inimical to his tastes for sports and his triumphs therein. But
Constance had pride in all that. She liked to feel him and to gaze
at him, and to smell that faint, uncleanly odour of sweat that
hung in his clothes.
In this condition he reached the advanced age of thirteen. And his
parents, who despite their notion of themselves as wide-awake
parents were a simple pair, never suspected that his heart,
conceived to be still pure, had become a crawling, horrible mass
of corruption.
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