lowed to walk about in the studies before eight dining-hall.
For a quarter of an hour there was silence in the passage.

Eight struck; there was an opening of doors.

A few minutes later Hunter dashed in.

"Well done, Caruthers. Hooray!"

"Well done, Caruthers!" "Good old A-K!" "I am so glad!" Everyone seemed
pleased.

Just before prayers, as he sat at the top of the day-room table,
FitzMorris came over to him. "Jolly good, Caruthers. Well done." His cup
was full.

Foster did not get his cap....

The next day as Gordon was walking across the courts in break "the Bull"
came up to him.

"Gratters, Caruthers; wasn't your fault you lost. I like a man who can
fight uphill. You have got the grit--well done, lad."

"And yet," said Gordon to Mansell, as they passed under the school
gate, "you say that man cares only for his house. Why, he only loves his
house because it's a part of Fernhurst; and Fernhurst is the passion of
his life!"

CHAPTER VII: WHEN ONE IS IN ROME ...

Generalisations are always apt to be misleading, but there was surely no
truer one ever spoken than the old proverb: "When one is in Rome, one
does as Rome does!" Parsons and godmothers will, of course, protest
that, if you found yourselves among a crowd of robbers and drunkards,
you would not copy _them_! And yet it is precisely what the average
individual would do. When a boy leaves his preparatory school he has a
conscience; he would not tell lies; he would be scrupulously honest in
form; he would not borrow things he never meant to return; he would say
nothing he would be ashamed of his mother or sister overhearing.

But before this same innocent has been at school two terms he has learnt
that everything except money is public property. The name in a book or
on a hockey stick means nothing. Someone once said to Collins:

"I say, I want to write here, are those your books?"

"No, they are the books I use," was the laconic answer.

The code of a Public School boy's honour is very elastic. Masters are
regarded as common enemies; and it is never necessary to tell them the
truth. Expediency is the golden rule in all relations with the common
room. And after a very few weeks even Congreve would have had to own
that the timid new boy could spin quite as broad a yarn as he. The
parents do not realise this. It is just as well. It is a stage in the
development of youth. Everyone must pass through it. Yet sometimes it
leads to quite a lot