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‘Oh,’ said King. ‘Dimovit obstantes propinquos. You, I presume, are the populus delaying Winton’s return to–Mullins, eh?’

‘No, sir,’ said Stalky behind his claret-coloured handkerchief. ‘We’re the maerentes amicos.’

‘Not bad! You see, some of it sticks after all,’ King chuckled to Hartopp, and the two masters left without further inquiries.

The boys sat still on the now-passive Winton.

‘Well,’ said Stalky at last, ‘of all the putrid he-asses, Pater, you are the–‘

‘I’m sorry. I’m awfully sorry,’ Winton began, and they let him rise. He held out his hand to the bruised and bewildered Vernon. ‘Sorry, Paddy. I–I must have lost my temper. I–I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’

”Fat lot of good that’ll do my face at tea,’ Vernon grunted. ‘Why couldn’t you say there was something wrong with you instead of lamming out like a lunatic? Is my lip puffy?’

‘Just a trifle. Look at my beak! Well, we got all these pretty marks at footer–owin’ to the zeal with which we played the game,’ said Stalky, dusting himself. ‘But d’you think you’re fit to be let loose again, Pater? ‘Sure you don’t want to kill another sub-prefect? I wish I was Pot. I’d cut your sprightly young soul out.’

‘I s’pose I ought to go to Pot now,’ said Winton.

‘And let all the other asses see you lookin’ like this! Not much. We’ll all come up to Number Five Study and wash off in hot water. Beetle, you aren’t damaged. Go along and light the gas-stove.’

‘There’s a tin of cocoa in my study somewhere,’ Perowne shouted after him. ‘Rootle round till you find it, and take it up.’

Separately, by different roads, Vernon’s jersey pulled half over his head, the boys repaired to Number Five Study. Little Hartopp and King, I am sorry to say, leaned over the banisters of King’s landing and watched.

‘Ve-ry human,’ said little Hartopp. ‘Your virtuous Winton, having got himself into trouble, takes it out of my poor old Paddy. I wonder what precise lie Paddy will tell about his face.’

‘But surely you aren’t going to embarrass him by asking?’ said King.

‘Your boy won,’ said Hartopp.

‘To go back to what we were discussing,’ said King quickly, ‘do you pretend that your modern system of inculcating unrelated facts about chlorine, for instance, all of which may be proved fallacies by the time the boys grow up, can have any real bearing on education–even the low type of it that examiners expect?’

‘I maintain nothing. But is it any worse than your Chinese reiteration of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue?’

‘Dead, forsooth!’ King fairly danced. ‘The only living tongue on earth! Chinese! On my word, Hartopp!’

‘And at the end of seven years–how often have I said it?’ Hartopp went on,–‘seven years of two hundred and twenty days of six hours each, your victims go away with nothing, absolutely nothing, except, perhaps, if they’ve been very attentive, a dozen–no, I’ll grant you twenty–one score of totally unrelated Latin tags which any child of twelve could have absorbed in two terms.’

‘But–but can’t you realise that if our system brings later–at any rate–at a pinch–a simple understanding–grammar and Latinity apart–a mere glimpse of the significance (foul word!) of, we’ll say, one Ode of Horace, one twenty lines of Virgil, we’ve got what we poor devils of ushers are striving after?’

‘And what might that be?’ said Hartopp.

‘Balance, proportion, perspective–life. Your scientific man is the unrelated animal–the beast without background. Haven’t you ever realised that in your atmosphere of stinks?’

‘Meantime you make them lose life for the sake of living, eh?’

‘Blind again, Hartopp! I told you about Paddy’s quotation this morning. (But he made probrosis a verb, he did!) You yourself heard young Corkran’s reference to maerentes amicos. It sticks–a little of it sticks among the barbarians.’

‘Absolutely and essentially Chinese,’ said little Hartopp, who, alone of the common-room, refused to be outfaced by King. ‘But I don’t yet understand how Paddy came to be licked by Winton. Paddy’s supposed to be something of a boxer.’