“Are you going through that forty-seventh problem this morning, sir?”
Dexter made a desperate attempt, floundered on a quarter of a minute, and broke down in half.
“Tut—tut—tut!” ejaculated Mr Limpney. “I’m sure you have not looked at it since I was here.”
“That I have, sir,” cried Dexter, in a voice full of eager protest. “Hours and hours, sir, I walked up and down the garden with it, and then I took the book up with me into my loft, and made a chalk triangle on the floor, and kept on saying it over and over, but as fast as I said it the words slipped out of my head again. I can’t help it, sir, I am so stupid.”
“Algebra!” said Mr Limpney, in a tone of angry disgust.
“Am I not to try and say the Euclid, sir?”
“Algebra!” cried Mr Limpney again, and he slapped the table with a thin book. “Now then, where are these simple equations?”
Dexter drew a half-sheet of foolscap paper from a folio, and rather shrinkingly placed it before his tutor, who took a pair of spectacles from his pocket, and placed them over his mild-looking eyes.
“Let me see,” he said, referring to a note-book. “The questions I gave you were: ‘A spent 2 shillings and 6 pence in oranges, and says that three of them cost as much under a shilling as nine of them cost over a shilling. How many did he buy?’”
Mr Limpney coughed, blew his nose loudly, as if it were a post-horn, and then went on—