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This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. For years the student and the professor had gone on complaining that minds were unequally inert. The inequalities amounted to contrasts. One class of minds responded only to habit; another only to novelty. Race classified thought. Class-lists classified mind.
Ambrose's College was a moderate-sized one. There were some seventy or eighty undergraduates in residence when our hero appeared there as a freshman, of whom a large proportion were gentleman-commoners, enough, in fact, to give the tone to the college, which was decidedly fast. Fewer and fewer of the St. Ambrose men appeared in the class-lists or among the prize men.
In the atmosphere of the examination system, deceit and hypocrisy are ever changing into self-deception; and all who become acclimatised to the influence of the system pupils, teachers, examiners, parents, employers of labour, ministers of religion, members of Parliament, and the rest fall victims, sooner or later, to the poison that infects it, and are well content to cheat themselves with outward and visible results, accepting "class-lists" and "orders of merit" as of quasi-divine authority, mistaking official regulations for laws of Nature, and the clumsy movements of over-elaborated yet ill-contrived machinery for the subtle processes of life.
But Rhoda didn't know; Peter had never told her; perhaps because it would be extravagant to have them, perhaps because he never put even foods into class-lists. Only Lucy knew without being told, probably because it was her favourite food too. When Lucy went, it was as if a ray of early spring sunshine had stolen into the room and gone.
Long afterwards, when the devious path of life led him back to teach in his turn what no student naturally cared or needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of faculty-meetings by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found himself graded precisely in the middle.
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