With Foskett, Martin was never in sympathy. He was out of touch with all the causes for which Foskett stood, and it was among the small set of desperately serious and religious boys that the headmaster found his champions. The very fact that he had not taken orders seemed to them, perhaps justly, proof of the deepest faith: in after life they would all have signed photographs in their studies and point him out to their sons. 'That's old Foskett,' they would say. 'Fine character. Great influence.' But the popular verdict was against Foskett. The really strong man can get his way without criticism: he says 'Do' and people just crumple up and do it. When Foskett said 'Do,' things were done as a rule, but the doer had a habit of saying, as he went grudgingly to his work: 'Silly ass, thinks he's a Blood-and-ironer.' Martin said of him to his uncle: 'He's quite efficient and all that, and he's bound to get on. As crushers go, he might be a lot worse.' And that was the common view. Foskett took the Upper Sixth in composition and Greek plays. Martin could not help admiring Foskett's fair copies which showed undoubted feeling for the classical languages, but he could never quite endure his enthusiasm for the Greek drama. When Foskett enjoyed literature in public, it always seemed as though he was saying sternly to himself: 'This is good stuff and we've got to like it.' He would stride up and down the room with the text of a play, chanting the iambics or the choruses as though they were everything in the world to him, and all the time Martin felt that it couldn't mean so much to him, just because he sought beauty with a fervour so literary and so incessant. With Martin, appreciation was a thing of moods, coming swiftly and as swiftly departing: he could not understand how Foskett's enjoyment remained always at high pressure: it must, he thought, be artificial. Foskett's affection for Euripides was the most unconvincing of enthusiasms: how could a man so far removed from Euripides in taste and temperament really appreciate that passionate rebel of genius? Martin could have tolerated an open enemy, a thorough conservative who called Euripides a botcher, and a dirty-minded botcher at that: but Foskett's liberal attitude, sweetly reasonable to the extent of being nauseous, was harder to endure. It was not so much that Foskett had set out to like Euripides because Euripides was fashionable once again, though that of course was possible: but it was his determination to be fair at all costs that was fatal. Foskett was so pertinaciously fair, so eager to do justice to both sides of the literary problem that Martin considered that he didn't in the end properly understand or sympathise with either side. It occurred to him that compromise is always necessary in human affairs and usually fatal. And so while Foskett declaimed the Electra and gave out the points to be noticed for and