imply crawls to any grown-up.
You should hear her talking to father and pretending that she thinks
fishing nice."

"She's perfectly right to do that. After all, Lalage, your father is a
canon and a certain measure of respect is due to his recreations as well
as to his serious work. Besides----"

"It's never right to crawl to any one."

"Besides," I said, "what you call crawling may in reality be sympathy.
I'm sure Miss Battersby has a sympathetic disposition. It is very
difficult to draw the line between proper respect, flavoured with
appreciative sympathy, and what you object to as sycophancy."

"If you're going to try and show off," said Lalage, "by using ghastly
long words which nobody could possibly understand you'd better go and
do it to the Cat. She'll like it. I'm not going to sit here all day
listening to you. Either read the magazine or don't, whichever you like.
I don't care whether you do or not, but I won't be jawed."

This subdued me at once. I began with the poem:

"Fair Cattersby I weep to see
You haste away by train,
As yet that Latin exercise
Has not been done again.
Stay, stay,
Until amo, I say.
(To be continued in our next)"

"There was a difficulty about the last three lines, I suppose," I said.

"Yes," said Lalage. "I couldn't remember how they went, and Cattersby
had the book. She pretends she likes reading poetry, though she doesn't
really, and she makes me learn off whole chunks of it."

"You can't deny that it comes in useful occasionally. I don't see how
you could have composed that parody if she hadn't made you learn----"

"She didn't. That's not the sort of poetry she makes me learn. If it was
I might do it. She finds out rotten things about 'Little Lamb, who made
you?' 'We are Seven,' and stuff of that sort. Not what I call poetry at
all."

I had the good sense while at Oxford to attend some lectures given by
the professor of poetry. I also belonged for a time to an association
modestly called "The Brotherhood of Rhyme." We used to meet in my rooms
and read original compositions to each other until none of us could
stand it any longer. I am therefore thoroughly well qualified to discuss
poetry with any one.

I should, under ordinary circumstances, have taken a pleasure in
defending the reputations of Blake and Wordsworth, but I shrank from
attempting to do so in a pigsty with Lalage Beresford as an opponent, I
turned to