“Doesn’t our Beetle hold with matrimony?”
“No, Padre; don’t make fun of me. I’ve met chaps in the holidays who’ve got married house-masters. It’s perfectly awful! They have babies and teething and measles and all that sort of thing right bung in the school; and the masters’ wives give tea-parties—tea-parties, Padre!—and ask the chaps to breakfast.”
“That don’t matter so much,” said Stalky. “But the house-masters let their houses alone, and they leave everything to the prefects. Why, in one school, a chap told me, there were big baize doors and a passage about a mile long between the house and the master’s house. They could do just what they pleased.”
“Satan rebuking sin with a vengeance.”
“Oh, larks are right enough; but you know what we mean, Padre. After a bit it gets worse an’ worse. Then there’s a big bust-up and a row that gets into the papers, and a lot of chaps are expelled, you know.”
“Always the wrong un’s; don’t forget that. Have a cup of cocoa, Padre?” said McTurk with the kettle.
“No, thanks; I’m smoking. Always the wrong ’uns? Pro-ceed, my Stalky.”
“And then”—Stalky warmed to the work—“everybody says, ‘Who’d ha’ thought it? Shockin’ boys! Wicked little kids!’ It all comes of havin’ married house-masters, I think.”
“A Daniel come to judgment.”
“But it does,” McTurk interrupted. “I’ve met chaps in the holidays, an’ they’ve told me the same thing. It looks awfully pretty for one’s people to see—a nice separate house with a nice lady in charge, an’ all that. But it isn’t. It takes the house-masters off their work, and it gives the prefects a heap too much power, an’—an’—it rots up everything. You see, it isn’t as if we were just an ordinary school. We take crammers’ rejections as well as good little boys like Stalky. We’ve got to do that to make our name, of course, and we get ’em into Sandhurst somehow or other, don’t we?”