THE FIRST BATTLE
new limitations. His immediate impulse was to escape the eye of the nicely dressed assistant master. "You'll write, I suppose, if you have anything," he said, and the precise young man responded with alacrity to his doorward motion.
"Often get that kind of thing?" asked the nicely dressed young man when Lewisham had departed.
"Rather. Not quite so bad as that, you know. That waterproof collar—did you notice it? Ugh! And—'I see.' And the scowl and the clumsiness of it. Of course he hasn't any decent clothes—he'd go to a new shop with one tin box! But that sort of thing—and boardschool teachers—they're getting everywhere! Only the other day—Rowton was here."
"Not Rowton of Pinner?"
"Yes, Rowton of Pinner. And he asked right out for a boardschool master. He said, 'I want some one who can teach arithmetic.'"
He laughed. The nicely dressed young man meditated over the handle of his cane. "A bounder of that kind can't have a particularly nice time," he said, "anyhow. If he does get into a decent school, he must get tremendously cut by all the decent men.
"Too thick-skinned to mind that sort of thing, I fancy," said the scholastic agent. "He's a new type. This South Kensington place and the polytechnics are turning him out by the hundred. . . ."
Lewisham forgot his resentment at having to profess a religion he did not believe, in this new discovery of the scholastic importance of clothing.
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