“Well,” remarked Beverly, one of the younger men, noted among his colleagues for his readiness to express an opinion upon any subject in the universe, “what do you think of the Head’s latest departure?”
Mr. Roylston pursed his thin close-shaven lips as though he were about to reply, but before doing so he carefully pressed the tobacco into his pipe, and struck a match and applied it. “I don’t know,” he muttered, between the puffs, in rather a high jerky voice, “that it makes very much difference what we think. But I am inclined to characterize it as an arrival rather than a departure.”
“It is certainly very much with us,” commented Gray, with an absent-minded glance into the fire.
“Well, I predict its speedy extinction,” resumed Beverly. “It is difficult for me to conceive how the Doctor can suppose that Finch will ever get on here. Upon my word, did you ever see such an object?”
“Upon my word, I did not,” answered Gray. “But here it certainly is, and in a sense it is bound to get on. I am entrusted with its table manners, if one may speak of what does not exist.”
“I believe that Morris is to have it in his house,” said Roylston, looking over at the chess players.
“It? who? Oh, you are talking about Finch, eh? Queer little duffer, isn’t he?”
“Queer?” murmured Beverly in a tone that spoke volumes of intense pity for the limits of Morris’s vocabulary. “Perhaps you can really tell us something about it, Mr. Morris?”
“Nothing much, I’m afraid,” Morris replied. “The Doctor has some special interest,—he’s a trust, I understand, from a very old friend. It is very much up to us, I fancy, to help make things easy for the poor kid. I shall speak to some of the boys in my house about him, and ask them to go out of their way to be a bit decent.”