He took up his magazine again, opened it, spread it upon his knees, and in one instant was absorbed in its pages.
The schoolmaster sat down on the window-seat and gazed alternately at the boy and at the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp above his head. Since he had been a little boy himself he had never felt so snubbed. He was wholly unaccustomed to be a cypher in the eyes of boys, and suddenly with devastating force there was flung upon him the conviction that he never saw a real boy at all—that the boys he saw were all carefully expurgated editions arranged to suit his sensibilities.
A wild spirit of enterprise seduced the schoolmaster. He felt himself as one who after long sailing in smooth, familiar waters suddenly sights an unknown and precipitous shore.
He had come to Oxford to get away from the boys he thought he knew. What if, at Oxford, he received real enlightenment with regard to a boy he did not know? The sunshine faded and the gallery grew dark. Outside, he heard the soft patter of a heavy April shower.
“You ought not to read in this light,” he said suddenly, “you will hurt your eyes.”
The boy looked up surprised at this fresh interruption, but he obediently closed his book: there is something almost irresistible in the commands of those accustomed to exert authority.
“Do you come here often?” asked the schoolmaster.
“Yes, whenever I’ve got threepence to get in.”
“Has no one ever told you that when you are talking to an older man it is considered polite to say ‘sir’?”
“No. I don’t know many old men, nor men at all, for the matter of that.”