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dently felt they had been hardly used, and he could not help
agreeing with their silent dissatisfaction. He could not see
either what General Gordon had to do with Livy. He haz-
arded an inquiry afterwards.
‘Eldridge was dreadfully put out because you asked him
what he knew about General Gordon,’ he said to the head-
master, with an attempt at a chuckle.
Mr. Perkins laughed.
‘I saw they’d got to the agrarian laws of Caius Gracchus,
and I wondered if they knew anything about the agrarian
troubles in Ireland. But all they knew about Ireland was
that Dublin was on the Liffey. So I wondered if they’d ever
heard of General Gordon.’
Then the horrid fact was disclosed that the new head
had a mania for general information. He had doubts about
the utility of examinations on subjects which had been
crammed for the occasion. He wanted common sense.
Sighs grew more worried every month; he could not get
the thought out of his head that Mr. Perkins would ask him
to fix a day for his marriage; and he hated the attitude the
head adopted towards classical literature. There was no
doubt that he was a fine scholar, and he was engaged on a
work which was quite in the right tradition: he was writing
a treatise on the trees in Latin literature; but he talked of it
flippantly, as though it were a pastime of no great impor-
tance, like billiards, which engaged his leisure but was not
to be considered with seriousness. And Squirts, the master
of the Middle Third, grew more ill-tempered every day.
It was in his form that Philip was put on entering the

Of Human Bondage