Don't remember the exact line but something about,
"A hundred pounds worth of private school education falls to a three ruppee slug."
Kipling neatly described a particular time and set of circumstances and yet did so in a manner that's both universal and timeless. It's not the same one you reference, but your quote recalled that in The Ballad of Boh da Thone we are told that:
The wind of the dawn went merrily past,
The high grass bowed her plumes to the blast.
And out of the grass, on a sudden, broke
A spirtle of fire, a whorl of smoke—
And Captain O’Neil of the Black Tyrone
Was blessed with a slug in the ulnar-bone—
The gift of his enemy Boh Da Thone.
(Now a slug that is hammered from telegraph-wire
Is a thorn in the flesh and a rankling fire.)
;^)