“You ask,” said Harold Withersq to Selia his love. “For this is a bit of a treat for you,” so she rang the brass bell and got her mouth ready to pop the question to the serving maids. A grand old woman in a white pinny came and opened.
“Pray conduct us to your owner,” said Selia in a wonderful chic voice. “We have come to join the school.”
The woman showed them into a white hall with two rows of littel coloured pictures painted on glass of chinamen and tigers very bright and instructing hung all down the sides. Mr. Withersq now puffed himself out [29] ]ready for the encounter. The old lady bobbed on before them down the white hall to a large chamber like a chapel with gold-edged pictures, some of Nude in galore, and twenty grown up young people sat in desks in this hall, scribbling on slates under the watching eye of a bald man mounted up on a littel platform at the top. All the bottom on his face was beard and his mouth made you laugh when he talked like looking at a person’s mouth talking upside down. And he had glasses with brown rims and ear-bits very costly and wise looking.
The twenty pupils raised their heads and stared.
Mr. Withersq stept boldly up to the teacher and laid a pound note on his desk.
“I have been insulted,” he cried waving his arms a little though not much out of respect, “my unckle Burt is dead and has left me a good bit. This is my girl Selia.”
[30] Selia gave a bow and muttered pleased to meet you.
“We are seeing life,” Mr. Withersq went on after this little interruption. “We have been to a party and danced and slept with the very creme of London, baronnesses and what not, and yet not an hour ago I was insulted. The creture that is called Boon gave me the bird and my Selia too, because he is so proud to be a poet. Make me a poet, make my lady a poet too if you can, and I will pay you well and pay them out.”
“That will do,” said the teacher. “You arent allowed to have quarrels before you’ve been printed so you both sit down and see what you can do.”
So they sat down both and had a stare at the others. They were again mostly like the beings at the party, but more younger men very drooping in figgur and unshorn heads, some of [31] ]whom munched drugs out of boxes while they worked, to keep their spirits up.