great change in his entire life. Something that he could not define was
drawing to an end, and something else, equally indefinable, was about to
begin. The "school for small children" which he had left, and the
"school for boys" into which he would soon enter, were the symbols used
by his mind to express the passing out of one phase of life into
another, but as such they suggested the actual change without revealing
it. And there were moments when Keith's vague efforts to look ahead were
accompanied by a sense of crushing dread, while at other times they
might fill him with a never before tasted fervor of existence.

He was near the completion of his ninth year. It seemed quite an age,
but this appearance was contradicted by troublesome facts. He was very
small for his age and hopelessly tied to the apron strings of his mother
in spite of all his father's efforts to pry him loose. The reason for
this failure was that his father lacked the time or the capacity for
winning the boy's whole-hearted attention and affection.

The one thing the father seemed to care for on his return home was to be
left alone with his own preoccupations, and these did not include the
boy. He could not unbend. He could not subordinate his own momentary
desire or disinclination to an interest essentially foreign to his own
self. In other words, he was just as self-centred as Keith, and just as
unreflecting on the whole. Both lived completely in the present, and
both wished to escape from it. The only difference between them was that
while Keith sought his escape in space, so to speak, by means of his
books, the father's only road of escape led him into a past of which the
boy formed no part.

Either through some fault of his own nature, or through the restrictive
policy of his parents, Keith at nine had formed no real attachments