He was unmarried, not because he disliked women, but from indolence, obstinacy, combativeness, and a coarse strain in him which made him regard the female body, attire and voice as rather ridiculous. With married women he was ceremonious and polite: with the unmarried he was bantering. When he had been twenty years at the school he began jocularly to speak of it as his bride, and when he came to his twenty-fifth year he regarded it as his silver wedding. He was very proud when his Form presented him with a smoker's cabinet and his colleagues subscribed for a complete edition of the works of Voltaire bound in vellum. Best of all was the fact that one of his boys, A. Z. Panoukian, an Armenian of the second generation (and therefore a thorough Thrigsbian), had won a scholarship at Balliol, the first since he had had charge of the Sixth. At Speech Day, when the whole school and their female relatives and the male parents of the prize-winners were gathered in the John Bright Hall, the Head Master would make a special reference to Panoukian and possibly to the happy coincidence of his performance with the attainment of Mr. Beenham's fourth of a century in the service of the pious and ancient foundation. It was possible, but unlikely, for the Head Master was a sentimentalist who made a point of presenting an arid front to the world lest his dignity should be undermined. It was with a glow of satisfaction that H. J. Beenham took out his master's hood and his best mortar-board on the eve of Speech Day and laid them out in his bedroom. This was at five o'clock in the afternoon, for he had promised to spend the evening with the Panoukian family at Bungsall, on the north side of the city. It was a heavy July day and he was rather tired, for he had spent the morning in school reading aloud from the prose works of Emerson, and the afternoon had been free, owing to the necessity of a replay of the Final in the inter-Form cricket championship between his boys and the Modern Transitus. He had intended to illuminate the event with his presence, but Thrigsby in July is not pleasant, and so he had come out by an early train to his house at Bigley in the hills which overflow Derbyshire into Cheshire.