was glad.

After lunch on Sunday afternoons he would walk with Finney on the
downs, and sometimes they would talk about the Public Schools. At
first Finney was reticent on their subject, but later he spoke with
growing freedom and intimacy.

"It's odd how we get chucked into it," Finney used to say. "Everyone
says teaching is the most important thing in the world, and they
chatter away about training and so on: and yet when it comes to the
point they allow their precious boys to be taught by men who are quite
untrained for this profession. No master at a Public School has had
any technical training or been taught how to see and shape things. He
just clears out of the varsity with some debts and a little despair and
then starts casually to do what is perhaps the most difficult and
important thing in the world. And they don't get the pick of the
varsities either: the standard keeps going down. The best men won't do
it if they can keep out."

Finney could not, in the presence of a pupil, finish his indictment as
he wished. Had it been possible he would have added: "The salaries are
contemptible and are kept low by the bribe of a house: which in reality
means that we have to pinch and scrape now because, if we are lucky, we
may be able to make a thousand a year at forty if we don't overfeed our
boys."

"And yet," suggested Martin, "don't you think it's rather refreshing to
find something left to common-sense. Everything gets into the hands of
faddists now. I once met an old lady who spent her life in teaching
children how to play. Imagine the cheek of it! You put me on to
Belloc and I think he's right about that sort of thing. We don't want
too much of the bureaucratic specialist."

"I quite agree," said Finney. "That's the tragedy. Just where
spontaneity really does matter, as in children's games, they go
blundering in and knock imagination out of their victims, or give them
someone else's, which is about the same thing. But just where training
might be of some use, they do nothing. The superstition that a man can
teach because he has taken a first in Classics at the varsity is
childish. I don't claim to know very much now, but when I started my
work I was hideously ignorant about the working of boys' minds: I never
knew when I was being obvious or when I got beyond them. Of course one
picks things up by experience, but it might be done so much better...."

"And then the narrowness," he rambled on,