Are you joking, Uncle?" The old man appeared to be puzzled by this query. "Joking?" he echoed. "Have you ever known me to joke about anything in my life?" Will was forced to concede that he had not. "At any rate," the old man continued, "it is not the Better Man Academy. It is the Betterman Academy." "It still sounds to me like a joke," Will said, "a name that someone has made up." Will altered his voice to sound as though he were reading an advertisement for hair tonic from one of the newspapers: "'Send your boy to us here at the Betterman Academy, and we will send you back a Better Man!'" "Perhaps Betterman is the name of the gentleman who founded the academy?" I interjected—helpfully, I thought. "Whatever it is named for, it still sounds nutty to me," Will muttered. I wondered at his aggression toward the mere name of the school. After all, he wasn't the one who was going to be attending there.
