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guessed that Mr Porteous was an expert on Late Latin poetry; and he did not mean that you should guess. Thin-limbed, bent and agile in his loose, crumpled clothes, Gumbril Senior had the air, beside Mr Porteous, of a strangely animated scarecrow.
    â€˜What on earth?’ the old gentleman repeated his question.
    Gumbril Junior shrugged his shoulders. ‘I was bored, I decided to cease being a schoolmaster.’ He spoke with a fine airy assumption of carelessness. ‘How are you, Mr Porteous?’
    â€˜Thank you, invariably well.’
    â€˜Well, well,’ said Gumbril Senior, sitting down again, ‘I must say I’m not surprised. I’m only surprised that you stood it, not being a born pedagogue, for as long as you did. What ever induced you to think of turning usher, I can’t imagine.’ He looked at his son first through his spectacles, then over the top of them; the motives of the boy’s conduct revealed themselves to neither vision.
    â€˜What else was there for me to do?’ asked Gumbril Junior, pulling up a chair towards the fire. ‘You gave me a pedagogue’s education and washed your hands of me. No opportunities, no openings. I had no alternative. And now you reproach me.’
    Mr Gumbril made an impatient gesture. ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ he said. ‘The only point of the kind of education you had is this, it gives a young man leisure to find out what he’s interested in. You apparently weren’t sufficiently interested in anything –’
    â€˜I am interested in everything,’ interrupted Gumbril Junior.
    â€˜Which comes to the same thing,’ said his father parenthetically, ‘as being interested in nothing.’ And he went on from the point at which he had been interrupted. ‘You weren’t sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote yourself to it. That was why you sought the last refuge of feeble minds with classical educations, you became a schoolmaster.’
    â€˜Come, come,’ said Mr Porteous. ‘I do a little teaching myself; I must stand up for the profession.’
    Gumbril Senior let go his beard and brushed back the hair that the wind of his own vehemence had brought tumbling into his eyes. ‘I don’t denigrate the profession,’ he said. ‘Not at all. It would be an excellent profession if every one who went into it were as much interested in teaching as you are in your job, Porteous, or I in mine. It’s these undecided creatures like Theodore, who ruin it by drifting in. Until all teachers are geniuses and enthusiasts, nobody will learn anything, except what they teach themselves.’
    â€˜Still,’ said Mr Porteous, ‘I wish I hadn’t had to learn so much by myself. I wasted a lot of time finding out how to set to work and where to discover what I wanted.’
    Gumbril Junior was lighting his pipe. ‘I have come to the conclusion,’ he said, speaking in little jerks between each suck of the flame into the bowl, ‘that most people . . . ought never . . . to be taught anything at all.’ He threw away the match. ‘Lord have mercy upon us, they’re dogs. What’s the use of teaching them anything except to behave well, to work and obey? Facts, theories, the truth about the universe – what good are those to them? Teach them to understand – why, it only confuses them; makes them lose hold of the simple real appearance. Not more than one in a hundred can get any good out of a scientific or literary education.’
    â€˜And you’re one of the ones?’ asked his father.
    â€˜That goes without saying,’ Gumbril Junior replied.
    â€˜I think you mayn’t be so far wrong,’ said Mr Porteous. ‘When I think of my own children, for example . . .’ he sighed, ‘I thought they’d be interested in the things that interested me; they don’t seem to be