“You might, of course; but they have gone up the school together for six years. I shouldn’t care to do it,” said Macrea.
“They use the editorial ‘we,’” said King, irrelevantly. “It annoys me. ‘Where’s your prose, Corkran?’ ‘Well, sir, we haven’t quite done it yet.’ ‘We’ll bring it in a minute,’ and so on. And the same with the others.”
“There’s great virtue in that ‘we,’” said little Hartopp. “You know I take them for trig. McTurk may have some conception of the meaning of it; but Beetle is as the brutes that perish about sines and cosines. He copies serenely from Stalky, who positively rejoices in mathematics.”
“Why don’t you stop it?” said Prout.
“It rights itself at the exams. Then Beetle shows up blank sheets, and trusts to his ‘English’ to save him from a fall. I fancy he spends most of his time with me in writing verse.”
“I wish to Heaven he would transfer a little of his energy in that direction to Elegiacs.” King jerked himself upright. “He is, with the single exception of Stalky, the very vilest manufacturer of ‘barbarous hexameters’ that I have ever dealt with.”
“The work is combined in that study,” said the chaplain. “Stalky does the mathematics, McTurk the Latin, and Beetle attends to their English and French. At least, when he was in the sick-house last month—”
“Malingering,” Prout interjected.
“Quite possibly. I found a very distinct falling off in their ‘Roman d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre’ translations.”
“I think it is profoundly immoral,” said Prout. “I’ve always been opposed to the study system.”