Quotes / Scholarship Student

Yet the Montague School appeared to recognise, in some small and infinitely patronising way, a vague duty towards those less fortunate than its fee-paying elite. Every ten years, a scholarship examination was held in the school's Great Hall, and this test, along with a subsequent interview, was used to determine the identities of those lucky few who would be plucked from a life once destined to be littered with disappointment and unhappiness, and instead be allowed to glimpse the possibility of a better future (even if that future was never really on offer, for the ignominious reek of charity would hang about them for the rest of their days, and dirt would forever cling to their boots, leaving a trail behind them so that the wealthy and privileged might not, however briefly, mistake them for their own).

—The Ritual Of The Bones