Arch Wembish's puns had given him a local reputation, one which he had to work hard to maintain, So after his Friday afternoon tutorial with young Ellenburg, one in which the student had stumbled as usual through the most elementary Latin, he had recovered from the ordeal by focusing on an image of the boy's short and thinning red hair and had thought immediately of a simple but elegant little play on words."Barbari sine barbis," he repeated to himself outside the door of the Masters' Room. When he entered, however, and saw that only Weston Hadley was there, he decided to save it for a better audience.

"Friday afternoon," he said instead, then added, "Et in Arcadia ego," pronouncing it, as he always did with Hadley, "eego." Hadley raised his glass in silent appreciation. It was a standard greeting between the two men, a joke from ten years before when one of the younger masters, looking at the dreary photograph of Poussin's "Shepherds in Arcadia" hanging on the wall of the Masters' Room, had solemnly translated, "And their egos are in Arcadia." Though he would not say so to anyone else, Wembish liked the greeting for another reason as well: it acknowledged that the Academy—even with the unpleasant changes of the past year—was, with its semi-rural setting, a refuge of sorts, particularly to men like Hadley and himself, both bachelors. And the grimly ironic connotation of the phrase—an inscription on a tomb—merely added to the pleasure Wembish felt in its Tightness.

"Arcadia with necessary libation," he said, pouring himself a glass of sherry from the sideboard."And where, my friend, are the others?"