A Prefect’s Uncle quotes

This was due partly to a succession of bad Head-prefects, and partly to Leicester himself, who was well-meaning but weak.

His spirit was willing, but his will was not spirited.

When things went on that ought not to have gone on, he generally managed to avoid seeing them, and the things continued to go on. Altogether, unless Gethryn’s rule should act as a tonic, Leicester’s was in a bad way.

He was in the Sixth, and a conscientious worker. Indeed, he was only saved from being considered a swot, to use the vernacular, by the fact that from childhood’s earliest hour he had been in the habit of keeping wicket like an angel.

To a good wicket-keeper much may be forgiven.

He handed Gethryn an envelope.

For a moment Gethryn seemed about to speak.

He looked fixedly at his uncle as he stood framed in the doorway, a cheerful column of cool, calm, concentrated cheek.

Then, as if realizing that no words that he knew could do justice to the situation, he raised his foot in silence, and “booted” his own flesh and blood with marked emphasis. After which ceremony he went, still without a word, upstairs again.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

A brother’s utter lack of interest in his sister’s actions is a weird and wonderful thing for an outsider to behold.

“Well, look here, I wish you’d get her to come. We could give them tea in here, and have rather a good time, don’t you think?”

Miss Mabel Lorimer’s exact age was fifteen. She had brown hair, blue eyes, and a smile which disclosed to view a dimple.

There are worse things than a dimple. Distinctly so, indeed.

When ladies of fifteen possess dimples, mere man becomes but as a piece of damp blotting-paper. Pringle was seventeen and a half, and consequently too old to take note of such frivolous attributes;

It was perhaps only natural that Farnie, having been warned so strongly of the inadvisability of having anything to do with Monk, should for that very reason be attracted to him.

Nobody ever wants to do anything except what they are not allowed to do.

Otherwise there is no explaining the friendship that arose between them. Jack Monk was not an attractive individual.

These defects would have mattered little, of course, in themselves. There’s many a bilious countenance, so to speak, covers a warm heart. With Monk, however, appearances were not deceptive.

He looked a bad lot, and he was one.

It was on the second morning of term that the acquaintanceship began. Monk was coming downstairs from his study with Danvers, and Farnie was leaving the fags’ day-room.

It never occurred to Farnie that a result equally profitable to himself, and decidedly more convenient for all concerned—with the possible exception of Monk—might have been arrived at if he had simply left the money in the box, and run away without it.

However, as the poet says, you can’t think of everything.

The new batsman had the bowling. He snicked his first ball for a single, bringing the novelist to the fore again, and Samuel Wilberforce Gosling vowed a vow that he would dismiss that distinguished novelist.

But the best intentions go for nothing when one’s arm is feeling like lead.

Of all the miserable balls sent down that afternoon that one of Gosling’s was the worst. It was worse than anything of Marriott’s. It flew sluggishly down the pitch well outside the leg stump. The novelist watched it come, and his eye gleamed.

Now, when he would have preferred to have avoided his species, men seemed to spring up from nowhere, and every man of them had a remark to make or a question to ask about the punctured tyre.

Reserve is not the leading characteristic of the average yokel.

Gethryn, however, refused to be drawn into conversation on the subject. At last one, more determined than the rest, brought him to bay.

“Well, Gethryn?” said Mr. Jephson.

The question “well?” especially when addressed by a master to a boy, is one of the few questions to which there is literally no answer.

You can look sheepish, you can look defiant, or you can look surprised according to the state of your conscience. But anything in the way of verbal response is impossible.

“Oh no,” said Pringle airily, “rather not. It’s been no trouble at all.”

He thus, it will be noticed, concluded a painful and immoral scene by speaking perfect truth.

A most gratifying reflection.

The genial “take a pew” of one’s equal inspires confidence. The raucous “sit down in front” of the frenzied pit, when you stand up to get a better view of the stage, is not so pleasant.

But worst of all is the icy “sit down” of the annoyed headmaster.

In his mouth the words take to themselves new and sinister meanings. They seem to accuse you of nameless crimes, and to warn you that anything you may say will be used against you as evidence.

“Well, at any rate, it’s over now. You needn’t jump on me. I acted from the best motives. That’s what my grandfather, Farnie’s pater, you know, always used to say when he got at me for anything in the happy days of my childhood.

Don’t sit there looking like a beastly churchwarden, you ass. Buck up, and take an intelligent interest in things.

”

“Can’t be helped. Painful but necessary. Now I’m going to tell Reece, though I don’t expect he’ll remember anything about it.

Reece never remembers anything beyond his last meal.

”

Norris and you are a rattling good pair of centre threes, but if he never gives you a pass, I don’t see how we can expect to have any combination in the First.

It’s no good my slinging out the ball if the centres stick to it like glue directly they get it, and refuse to give it up.

It’s simply sickening.”