It had grown up like a mushroom, and no one exactly remembered how it began.

Mr Bickers, some years ago, had been a candidate for the Mastership of the Shell, but had been passed over in favour of Mr Roe.
And ever since, so report went, he had been actuated by a fiendish antipathy to the boys who "kept" in the house of his rival.

He had worried Mr Moss out of the place, and the boys of the two houses, quick to take up the feuds of their chiefs, had been in a state of war for months.

Not that Mr Bickers was a favourite in his own house.

He was not, any more than Mr Moss had been in his.