"Wouldn't it be a good idea," I replied, "if prefects were not elected until they had risen high enough in the school not to have 'fags' in their forms? After all, one of the reasons for coming to school is to work, though we seem to do our best to gloss over that inconvenient fact." I have had a series of visits lately from Stapleton, who was at Oxford with me: he has been appointed curate at Todsdale, an enormous mining town, and the life there is nearly killing him. The eternal squalor and dreariness of the life, the pettiness of the routine at the Clergy House, the lack of any intellectual or æsthetic interests all bid fair to send him out of his mind. He usually comes over on a motor-bicycle on Thursday afternoons, and pours out all his troubles as we walk up and down the seashore: he reads to me his sermons, he gives me graphic accounts of the quarrels about ceremonial and duty that occur daily over meals in the Clergy House, of some of the hovels he has to visit, of his opponents among the laity and so on. He seems to be getting mixed up with some mill-girl in a way I can't quite understand: it sounds as if her people were trying their hardest to secure him as a husband for their daughter: perhaps they know that he has considerable private means, for the average curate is not much of a catch in the eyes of the north-country factory worker: he has no prospects. I must say I admire Stapleton's courage and devotion to duty in cutting himself off from the beauties of the south, from all decent society, and all chance of meeting a girl of his own status: it must be a terrible life for him, for his senses are not blunted. He sits and mopes, thinking over old days when he too lived in Arcadia. I don't think that I could ever settle down in the north. I like the bustle and the sense of importance that possesses the money-makers in Leeds, but I object to the absence of sun, of the sleepy happiness of the south; the crude dialect, rasping and hard, seems typical of the people here. They seem to have no time to devote to anything which does not actually increase their income, they pride themselves on their parsimony and yet they are strangely inconsistent.