CHAPTER V.THE IN-OR-IN.
Georgie Bassett was a boy set apart.

Not only that; Georgie knew that he was a boy set apart.

He would think about it for ten or twenty minutes at a time, and he could not look at himself in a mirror and remain wholly without emotion.

What that emotion was, he would have been unable to put into words; but it helped him to understand that there was a certain noble something about him that other boys did not possess.
Georgie's mother had been the first to discover that Georgie was a boy set apart.

In fact, Georgie did not know it until one day when he happened to overhear his mother telling two of his aunts about it.
True, he had always understood that he was the best boy in town and he intended to be a minister when he grew up; but he had never before comprehended the full extent of his sanctity, and, from that fraught moment onward, he had an almost theatrical sense of his set-apartness.
Penrod Schofield and Sam Williams and the other boys of the neighbourhood all were conscious that there was something different and spiritual about Georgie, and, though this consciousness of theirs may have been a little obscure, it was none the less actual.