“Not perhaps in those words, but that is how I have formulated what I understood you to say.”
“My dear fellow, I couldn’t have thought of anything half so brainy. I was only afraid that those sort of things wouldn’t work very well in this particular parish. As a matter of fact, they don’t seem to be taking very kindly to them, do they?”
“They need educating,” said Snape, quite complacently. “At the start there is bound to be friction. And, as you know, friction always generates heat!”
He evidently felt that he had said a neat thing, and laughed in the manner of a pious man making an innocent concession to frivolity. I felt as if he were beginning to hypnotise me.
“What we should do,” he continued with a bland air of superior wisdom, “is just as in mechanics—to find the co-efficient of friction, that’s what we want—the co-efficient of friction.”
“What we want is lubricating oil, I should think.”
“Quite, quite. Oh yes, we must have our lubricating oil too, but at a later stage. We must first find our co-efficient.”
He had a morbid delight in the phrase, a bubble from the forgotten mathematics of his Little-go days that something had set dancing in his brain-pan. I knew it had no meaning in this connection, but like most of us, the man did not want meanings. I saw he would make a great hit at a clerical meeting with his “co-efficient of friction,” and I felt certain he was making a mental note of it for some such purpose.
He surprised me, too, for although he had manifestly made a mess of things in the parish his manner had an assurance, and even an assumption, of superiority, very different from the timidity I remembered at first. No doubt that had been merely the result of the shyness which mere unfamiliarity produces in weak natures. It had worn off now, and I liked him even less.
“It seems to me,” I said, rather brutally, “that the friction is mainly about who should be secretaries and so on.”