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He had been in no way indignant with his sentence—he knew that it was wrong for him to spoil his clothes with mud and disobey those in authority—but for the first time there had stolen into his mind wonder as to why the things that he wanted were always out of his reach. Then, as he grew older, there followed the further wonder as to why he wanted things that nobody else wanted.

At his private school at Rottingdean he learnt the first thing that little boys must be—to be like other little boys. He discovered that he was not like other little boys, and that he must hide this discovery, so he developed two Wildhernes, one that cared for football, sardines, and doughnuts in bed at night, and "scraps" with other boys, and the other that never knew what it cared for, had strange feelings about flowers, the sea, and English history, and a passionate devotion for everything that concerned Wintersmoon.

This second personality, he discovered, must be seen only by his father and one of the under-gardeners. The rest of the world laughed did he show any enthusiasm for anything that had not to do with games. At school above all he must appear to detest work of any kind. He liked work, but could not apply himself to it because thoughts about Wintersmoon and the spire of Salisbury Cathedral and the way the sea rolled in and strangled the pebbles on the long beach below the school would keep breaking in. Meanwhile he loved the under-gardener, who was called Mitchell and showed him how flowers grew, told him the names of birds, and was dismissed, in Wildherne's first year at Eton, for drunkenness.