"Ah! In lieu of morning prayers let us contemplate Pontifex."
"Law, why that, on a spring morning?"
"He hath been subjected to experiment and found wanting."
"How's that?"
"The verb, boy. Consider, it was the doom of Pontifex to read all those twice five copies. Well, sir, in one of 'em, taking not even you into my confidence, I inserted one error, a miserable crawling misplaced accent—a wee louse, do you see, nibbling the fair white integument of a Greek verb. Did he discover, percontate and make manifest this crapulent, this obscene and overweening impudicity? Damn, I forgot concupiscent. Did he find this adventitious louse to be a concupiscent intrusion upon the fulgurant purity of grammatical impeccancy, and crack the hereinbeforementioned louse upon that sable thumbnail? Nah. By the way, where'd the bloody pot get to this time?"
"Under your bed," said Ben, exasperated, for the Cyprian fantasy had not completely dissolved, and it did seem too bad that the last of it must be dismissed by the unequivocal din of urination.
"There!" Reuben sighed. "I have subsumed the concupiscent." He stooped to pat the floor a few times with the flat of his hands, and sprawled back on his bed. "With reference, sir, to that Cicero whose lank shadow falleth across our afternoon: Sunt autem qui dicant foedus esse quoddam sapientius ut ne minos amicos quam se ipsos diligant. Do you understumble me, sir?"
"Please, sir, no, sir."
"I freely render: Some say there's a kind of compact of the wise, to love their friends no less than themselves. You may construe."
"Please, sir, no, sir, I won't, sir."