喫煙室にいる2人の男性が私立学校の日について話していました。
we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase. What was it like? Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn’t somebody invent one, I wonder?’‘You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own. There’s a subject for you, by the way—’The Folklore of Private Schools’.’‘Yes; the crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.’‘Nowadays the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon.’‘No doubt: they weren’t born or thought of in my time. Let’s see. I wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, ‘I’ve seen it,’ and died.’‘Wasn’t that the house in Berkeley Square?’