“A belittling life--a belittling life.” The chaplain rose. “I go to correct French exercises. By dinner King will have scored off some unlucky child of thirteen; he will repeat to us every word of his brilliant repartees, and all will be well.” “But about those three. Are they so prurient-minded?” “Nonsense,” said little Hartopp. “If you thought for a minute, Prout, you would see that the ‘precocious flow of fetid imagery,’ that King complains of, is borrowed wholesale from King. _He_ ’nursed the pinion that impelled the steel.’ Naturally he does not approve. Come into the smoking-room for a minute. It isn’t fair to listen to boys; but they should be now rubbing it into King’s house outside. Little things please little minds.” The dingy den off the Common-room was never used for anything except gowns. Its windows were ground glass; one could not see out of it, but one could hear almost every word on the gravel outside. A light and wary footstep came up from Number Five. “Rattray!” in a subdued voice--Rattray’s study fronted that way. “D’you know if Mr. King’s anywhere about? I’ve got a--” McTurk discreetly left the end of the sentence open. “No, he’s gone out,” said Rattray unguardedly. “Ah! The learned Lipsius is airing himself, is he? His Royal Highness has gone to fumigate.” McTurk climbed on the railings, where he held forth like the never-wearied rook. “Now in all the Coll. there was no stink like the stink of King’s house, for it stank vehemently and none knew what to make of it. Save King. And he washed the fags _privatim et seriatim_. In the fishpools of Hesbon washed he them, with an apron about his loins.” “Shut up, you mad Irishman!” There was the sound of a golf-ball spurting up gravel. “It’s no good getting wrathy, Rattray. We’ve come to jape with you. Come on, Beetle. They’re all at home. You can wind ’em.” “Where’s the Pomposo Stinkadore? ’Tisn’t safe for a pure-souled, high-minded boy to be seen round his house these days. Gone out, has he? Never mind. I’ll do the best I can, Rattray. I’m _in loco parentis_ just now.” (“One for you, Prout,” whispered Macrea, for this was Mr. Prout’s pet phrase.) “I have a few words to impart to you, my young friend. We will discourse together a while.” Here the listening Prout sputtered: Beetle, in a strained voice, had chosen a favorite gambit of King’s. “I repeat, Master Rattray, we will confer, and the matter of our discourse shall not be stinks, for that is a loathsome and obscene word. We will, with your good leave--granted, I trust, Master Rattray, granted, I trust--study this--this scabrous upheaval of latent demoralization. What impresses me most is not so much the blatant indecency with which you swagger abroad under your load of putrescence” (you must imagine this discourse punctuated with golf-balls, but old Rattray was ever a bad shot) “as the cynical immorality with which you revel in your abhorrent aromas. Far be it from me to interfere with another’s house--”