e.

"Yes, by gum. My brother at Sandhurst told me a grand story about her."

"What was it?"

"It's jolly hot stuff."

"All the better. Let's have it."

Then Cullen launched out. Martin, who could not help overhearing every
word, understood the beginning of the tale, but just when Neave's
exclamation betrayed the listener's thrill, he found it unintelligible.
And later on there was the recitation of a Limerick which he could not
at all understand. It was not that anything deeply wicked was related,
but Martin had been a day boy at his private school and had only
received a vague impression of the ways of nature and of man. Never
before had it struck him how confused and ignorant he was.

Then a mighty voice roared: "What the deuce are you all playing at?"
Numerous forms in more or less advanced stages of nudity started like
rabbits to their proper cubicles, while Moore bellowed in the doorway.
If it had been anyone but Moore there would have been a row: but Moore
was an angel and never did anything but shout. The lights were turned
down and the voices died away.

Cullen took one lingering glance at Sally before he put her away and
said his prayers: Neave, having ended his supplications, lay chuckling
quietly in bed. Martin began to feel acutely miserable. In spite of
all his hopes that the dormitory would bring him peace, he had only
come across another door which had to be opened. There was no escape:
he would have to find out, for he might be expected to join in one of
these conversations and then he would be shown up. He would have to
discover some decent new boy and question him tactfully. It would be
embarrassing: it would be perfect hell: but it would be inevitable. He
began to wish he was back in Devonshire, at home. God, how he loathed
Life and Elfrey and Sally Savoy: he wanted ... but just when, in spite
of the promptings of conscience, he was yielding to the soft embrace of
sentiment and memory, sleep saved the situation.

II

It is one of the world's happiest phenomena that pessimism, by creating
expectations gloomier far than any possible event, destroys by that
very process its _raison d'etre_. For Martin the future had, almost of
necessity, to be brighter than its promise. He was pushed into his
right place in chapel and found his way, without undue meandering, to
the Lower Fifth classroom: he even appeased the Terror by his ability
to explain the history of the genitive case