When the bounder at Castleford had been discussed Lewisham presented his paper, and the precise young man with his eye still fixed on the waterproof collar took the document in the manner of one who reaches across a gulf.  “I doubt if we shall be able to do anything for you,” he said reassuringly.  “But an English mastership may chance to be vacant.  Science doesn’t count for much in our sort of schools, you know.  Classics and good games—­that’s our sort of thing.”

“I see,” said Lewisham.

“Good games, good form, you know, and all that sort of thing.”

“I see,” said Lewisham.

“You don’t happen to be a public-school boy?” asked the precise young man.

“No,” said Lewisham.

“Where were you educated?”

Lewisham’s face grew hot.  “Does that matter?” he asked, with his eye on the exquisite grey trousering.

“In our sort of school—­decidedly.  It’s a question of tone, you know.”

“I see,” said Lewisham, beginning to realise 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 door-ward 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 board school 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 board schoolmaster.  He said, ‘I want someone 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 an 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.  He went along with an eye to all the shop windows that afforded a view of his person.  Indisputably his trousers were ungainly, flapping abominably over his boots and bagging terribly at the knees, and his boots were not only worn and ugly but extremely ill blacked.  His wrists projected offensively from his coat sleeves, he perceived a huge asymmetry in the collar of his jacket, his red tie was askew and ill tied, and that waterproof collar!  It was