“And has asked whether I hadn’t better have a private tutor in Latin in the holidays,” continued the outraged David. “It’s really too sickening, just as if one didn’t have enough of the dreary fellows in the term. And of course I had to lie about what goes on in the form. He asked me at Christmas whether there was any cribbing, and I looked as if I simply didn’t know what cribbing meant.” “Perhaps nobody cribbed when he was an infant phenomenon,” said Bags. David scratched his head. “It’s all rather rotten if you come to think of it,” he said. “I only crib sufficiently myself to get off impots, and very often I run it too fine and don’t crib enough. But I do think it’s rot to crib your way to the top of the form. Cribbing wasn’t meant for that. Plugs got full marks last Euclid lesson, just by copying the propositions slap out of the book. He didn’t have the decency to make a howler or two!” Bags inserted a lump of sugar in a small hole which he had bitten in the rind of an orange, and began to suck the sweetened juice. He had come on amazingly during this last half-year, and David was no longer in the least ashamed of him as a pal. He wasn’t any good at games, and consequently would have been an entire nonentity in any house except Adams’s. But in Adams’s, so the rest of the school thought, even the juniors took an interest in all sorts of queer things like reading books which had got nothing to do with school work, and knowing the difference between Liberals and Conservatives. Such topics and pursuits were held to be laudable affairs for the occupation of the mind in Adams’s, and the daily paper was not merely the source from which it was discovered who had made a century in a county match. Adams had half the house in and out of his study all day, and the conversation was generally supposed to be of the most abstruse type. An odd thing was, too, that the house was just as keen on games as any other, and was possessed of most of the competitive cups. But, having trained and practised and won their cup, the house did not make this the sole topic of interest and congratulation. This was not the usual plan, and the consideration that Bags had won at Adams’s would certainly not have been his elsewhere. Bags considered this short disquisition on the proper sphere of cribbing for a little. He himself was in the parallel remove to David’s, where it so happened that no cribbing went on. This was merely a question of fashion, and was as arbitrary and inexplicable as all other fashions, but as binding. Some forms cribbed, some didn’t. Local fashions, not any sense of honesty, directed it. “’Tisn’t a satisfactory state of things though,” he said. “If everybody cribbed everything, it would be all right, because then everybody would get full marks——” David laughed.