Wintery Devon

In A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, the winter session at the Devon school is shadow of the summer session. In the summer, the Devon school had “slipped through their fingers.” Gene and Phineas had been allowed to go to the beach, jump from a high tree, skip dinner, and play card games without getting caught. The master of the summer session, Mr. Prud’homme, was a substitute that did not know all the rules and traditions, which the boys “simply took advantage of.” Once the winter session started strict rules, hierarchy, and busy schedules came back, and “continuity was stressed.” Gene narrates the impact of the summer on the winter session when talking about Brinker Hadley, who got Leper’s summer room:

Ordinarily he should have been a magnet for me, the center of all the excitement and influences in the class. Ordinarily this would have been so – if the summer, the gypsy days, had not intervened. Now… Brinker had nothing to offer in place of Leper’s dust motes and creeping ivy and snails.

Because of the summer session, Gene feels that Brinker has “nothing to offer” compared to Leper. “If” there was no summer session, Gene thinks that Brinker would have been the cause for “excitement” and would “influence” him. Gene thinks this, because he views the summer as the gypsy days. The definition of a gypsy is a person who leads an unconventional life. This means that in the summer Gene was living an “idiosyncratic” life, and as a result cannot get used to the ordinary life of rules and traditions at Devon.