A schoolboy sets out, therefore, to discover school life for himself. He knows what his parents expect him to make of it; he has a fairly shrewd idea of what his schoolmaster expects him to make of it. It remains for him to investigate school life as his companions have made it. Naturally he does not announce his investigations. He lets his parents think what they like and his schoolmasters think what they like. He goes his own way. And it is thus that school life as it is, differs so enormously from the traditional concept of it. There must be always a gulf between the reality and the imagined idea. But in public school life the gulf is between, not the schoolboy reality and his idea of it, but between the schoolboy reality, and the confused idea of it that is held by parents and masters. It is two degrees from the truth. In consequence, when any one does attempt to tell the truth there is an outburst of indignant protest. And the worst of it is that it is an honest outburst. When head masters write to the Press and say 'these accusations are entirely false,' they honestly believe what they say. That is what makes everything so difficult. They have forgotten their own schooldays, and for so long they have been persuading parents of the value of a public school education that they have come to believe in their own advertisements. And yet what they have come to believe is far more remarkable than the truth. In sermons and addresses they assure the boy and his parents that school life is a miniature of the larger world; which is the statement of a fact: yet every subsequent act and utterance is in contradiction to this initial axiom. For, if that larger world did really resemble the official concept of school life, what a bizarre, what an extravagant affair it would be. It would be filled with high lights, with breathless escapades, with impossible heroics. It has been accepted as quite credible that a boy should be capable of the most extreme and loathsome brutalities, that a percentage of every school should spend its life in gambling and heavy drinking, that at least one prefect in every school should contract inconvenient liabilities at the Baron's Arms, and that to extricate himself he should forge his house-master's signature. Indeed, anything may happen provided that the course of life follows a simple process of right and wrong which leads to the triumph of virtue and the downfall of vice. It is something like a Lyceum melodrama. And, though we can all manage to enjoy for a couple of hours the fine sensationalism of _The Beggar Girl's Wedding_, we should hardly accept its values as a philosophical background for our daily life. And yet that has actually happened in the case of the Public Schools. Mr P. G. Wodehouse, in his delightful _Mike_, makes Psmith say to a new acquaintance: 'Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is led astray and takes to drink in Chapter Sixteen?' Such figureheads exist in the popular imagination. The world believes in bullies, in villains, in straight heroes and in the weak character who goes wrong, but is saved through the influence of either the hero or the head master, or the head master's daughter, or through the sermon of an occasional preacher. It is all very jolly, of course, and no doubt the world would be a far more comfortable place if it were possible to label and pigeonhole all our friends and acquaintances. But life cannot be simplified by any arbitrary process. We have our standards of conduct, but they are shifting and relative. They are the measures that each successive society arranges for what it considers to be its convenience. And we accept them for what they are. At a Public School, however, a traditional conception has formed a code of rules for the convenience of a society that does not exist. Which is confusing: and when Desmond Coke wrote in _The Bending of a Twig_ a very entertaining skit on the behaviour of a boy who had read a number of school stories, and went to Shrewsbury expecting to find bullies behind every cloister, schoolmasters laughed over the book, but did not read into it any criticism of themselves.