Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn't even known it was there. Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnish and wax. In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.

I didn't entirely like this glossy new surface, because it made the school look like a museum, and that's exactly what it was to me, and what I did not want it to be. Perhaps the school wasn't as well kept up in those days perhaps varnish, along with everything else, had gone to war. But, of course, fifteen years before there had been a war going on. It seemed more sedate than I remembered it, more perpendicular and strait-laced, with narrower windows and shinier woodwork, as though a coat of varnish had been put over everything for better preservation. I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.

Novel a separate peace