 herself, and
through this their countenance for her nephew. She found the football club in a
slight money difficulty and gave half a sovereign towards its removal. The boys
had no chance against her, she shot them down one after another as easily as
though they had been roosting pheasants. Nor did she escape scathless herself,
for as she wrote to me, she quite lost her heart to half a dozen of them. »How
much nicer they are,« she wrote, »and how much more they know, than those who
profess to teach them.«
    I believe it has been lately maintained that it is the young and fair who
are the truly old and truly experienced inasmuch as it is they who alone have a
living memory to guide them; »the whole charm,« it has been said, »of youth lies
in its advantage over age in respect of experience, and when this has for some
reason failed or been misapplied, the charm is broken. When we say that we are
getting old, we should say rather that we are getting new or young, and are
suffering from inexperience - trying to do things which we have never done
before, and failing worse and worse till in the end we are landed in the utter
impotence of death.«
    Miss Pontifex died many a long year before the above passage was written,
but she had arrived independently at much the same conclusion.
    She first, therefore, squared the boys - Dr. Skinner was even more easily
dealt with. He and Mrs. Skinner called as a matter of course as soon as Miss
Pontifex was settled. She fooled him to the top of his bent, and obtained the
promise of a MS. copy of one of his minor poems (for Dr. Skinner had the
reputation of being quite one of our most facile and elegant minor poets) on the
occasion of his first visit. The other masters and masters' wives were not
forgotten. Alethæa laid herself out to please, as indeed she did wherever she
went, and if any woman lays herself out to do this she generally succeeds.
 

                                   Chapter 34

Miss Pontifex soon found out that Ernest did not like games - but she saw also
that he could hardly be expected to like them. He was perfectly well shaped but
unusually devoid of physical muscular strength. He got a fair share of this in
after life, but it came much later with him than with other boys, and at the
time of which I am writing he was a mere little skeleton. He wanted something to
develop his arms and chest without knocking him about as much as the
