The committee for the ninth-year trip met for eleven minutes, and the minutes of that meeting are worth reading.
Two costs were on the table. The bus company charges a flat fee of $180 for the day, whether one pupil travels or forty. The museum charges $6 per student at the door. Families had already handed in $348 altogether, and the question was simple: how many pupils could go?
The treasurer answered first, and answered wrongly. He divided $348 by $6 and announced that fifty-eight pupils could travel. Somebody laughed, because the bus has forty-one seats, and somebody else asked the better question: what happened to the $180?
The form teacher took the chalk. The bus is paid once, she said, so take it off the top first: $348 minus $180 leaves $168. That money, and only that money, is divided at $6 a head. It buys exactly twenty-eight tickets.
Twenty-eight pupils went. The bus had thirteen empty seats, the museum gave the class a guide for nothing, and the treasurer wrote a sentence in the minutes that his teacher later pinned above the noticeboard:
A cost that is paid once does not belong to each person.