humbled and fallen. It was the first time for many years that Amey
Hampden had been backward in her lessons, and what was worse, there
were girls in my section who had looked forward with an eager desire
to a day when my conquering spirit would be baffled.

I could detect a gathering expression of the meanest gratification on
more faces than one as I stood up to accuse myself, without any
justification whatever, of having brought my task unprepared to the
school-room. The words almost stifled me. I fain would have pleaded
illness or some other false reason for my transgression. Nothing
seemed so dreadful as to provoke a sneer from my unworthy rivals.

I could feel myself losing ground even at that moment, I, who had felt
myself so secure in my superiority, now saw myself threatened with a
most inglorious downfall--a mere trifle in the eyes of the matured and
sophisticated worldling who has had to do battle with some of the most
merciless freaks of fate, but every ambitious student knows that such
a crisis as this, under circumstances such as these, tries his moral
endurance, which is yet necessarily very limited, as severely as a
like turning-point, on a grander scale, tested that of a Caesar or a
Bonaparte.

I had made my own little conquests, and had established myself as a
leading power among my fellow-students, in a way, maybe, I took a vain
pleasure in my own successes which, after all, were only the lawful
performances of my duty, but then, it is a very plausible thing for
people to do what is expected of them now-a-days, and I had reaped a
bountiful harvest of recompense for my diligence and assiduity.

However, I now saw plainly the truth of the proverbial warning that