This weakness is not confined to schoolmasters, of course. All bodies of men of the same calling herded together for protracted periods of time are inclined to the habit, but most of them take elaborate precautions to eradicate it. In military and naval circles, for instance, certain subjects are tabu. Even undergraduates mulct one another in pots of beer if the line be crossed. But schoolmasters are incorrigible. They talk boy and nothing else. The explanation is simple. Boys are the most interesting things in the world.
Studley Senior Common Room was no exception. At the top of the table the Head and his senior colleagues discussed high-school politics--scholarships, roseola, and the latest eccentricity of the Governing Body. About the middle of the table, where housemasters and form-masters were intermingled, a housemaster would explain to a form-master, with studious moderation and paternal solemnity, that owing to the incompetence, prejudice, and spite of the form-master a certain godly and virtuous youth named Jinks _tertius_ was making no progress in his studies, and was, moreover, acutely depressed by the injustice with which he was being borne down. In reply to this the form-master would point out in the most courteous and conciliatory tones, that the said Jinks was an idle young scoundrel, and that until the housemaster abandoned his present short-sighted and officious policy of habitually intervening between Jinks and his deserts,--to wit, the rod,--no further progress could possibly be expected. Why couldn't housemasters back form-masters up a bit? And so on. Lower down the table, three single-minded partisans were hotly disputing as to whether, upon a given date last summer, in a given junior inter-form cricket match, one Maggs (of the Lower Remove) did or did not feloniously give one Baggs (of the Upper Fourth) out leg-before-wicket at the instigation of a muscular bowler named Craggs. The only two persons at the table who were not talking boy were Mr. Chigley and Mr. Cleeve. Mr. Chigley, between mouthfuls, complained bitterly and unceasingly of the food; while Mr. Cleeve remorselessly conducted an inattentive audience, hole by hole, step by step, stroke by stroke, through the intricacies of a battle fought by himself against apparently incredible odds that afternoon--and of a victory snatched away on the last green, seemingly by the sudden and officious intervention of Providence, after what must have been one of the worst and most uninteresting exhibitions of golf ever seen.