"It likes me him not, this young man!" declared Reb Monash with some anxiety. But there was not at this time any specific reason for forbidding the friendship between the two lads; so that when _chayder_ and _shool_ left room for the dissipation, Philip was away up Doomington Road and in the kitchen beyond the Drapery and Hosiery Establishment. "I don't know what it is," Philip was saying, "I don't know what it is about poetry. Somehow, you can get away with it. It's like a ... it's like a road, isn't it? You start in Angel Street and you start walking and hey, hullo! where are you?" "You're right and you're wrong!" declared Harry. He was now a mature man of twelve, and in ways more or less subtle was fond of rendering the disparity of a year between them apparent to Philip. "It's more'n that, I think. It can take you away, but it can keep you there as well. You understand better what it all means. You understand, that's what poetry means!" he declared solemnly, his face assuming an aspect of such inscrutable wisdom as Philip might or might not penetrate. "I can't understand!" said Philip morosely. "It's too big to try. Besides I _don't_ want to understand, so there! It's rotten, the whole thing's rotten, _chayder_ and Angel Street and _shool_ and the lads and everything. I hate it all and I don't want to understand it. I just _feel_ that poetry's nice, a million times nicer than all this everywhere...." He pointed comprehensively beyond and round the walls of the kitchen to include the whole of life as it presented itself to him. "What a girly-girly word, nice!" scoffed Harry. "You ought to be careful what words you say or you'll never get a scholarship. Poetry is not nice--it's splendid, and magnificent and all that sort of thing. _Nice_! Ugh!" "Well, you know what I mean!" said Philip uncomfortably. The tendency to jibe at him was a somewhat distracting trait that had manifested itself in his relations with Harry. The wholly undefined idea stirred vaguely within him that Harry treated him somewhat as he treated poetry--as something out of which he could make intellectual capital, something to make use of--like chewing gum which you kept on chewing and chewing until there wasn't any more chew in it, and then you just stuck it under a chair and forgot about it. But he speedily shook off ideas of this disturbing kind. Life was already sufficiently complicated without mixing it up with silly old bogeys which led nowhere. Moreover, his friendship with Harry was worth it, if only for the sake of discussing poetry. "Poetry makes you _feel_ funny!" said Philip. "It's nicer'n singing or pictures. It doesn't let you think at all ... I mean thinking like thinking out sums about how many herrings in a barrel at twelve and sixpence what's one and a half next week! See?" "There's thinking and thinking!" Harry postulated. "There's thinking about herrings and a half--and thinking about philoserphy!" he declared pompously.