Winterbourne was brought into much closer intimacy with Evans, and had some opportunity to observe him. The officer was distinctly friendly, and they talked a good deal in the long hours of hanging about in the Front line. Evans brought sandwiches and a flask of rum with him, and invariably shared them with his runner; a kindness which touched Winterbourne profoundly. Usually about ten o’clock they sat on a fire-step under the frosty stars, and ate and talked. Occasionally a few shells would go whining overhead, or a burst of machine-gun fire would interrupt them. Their low voices sounded strangely muffled in the cold dead silence. Evans was the usual English public school boy, amazingly ignorant, amazingly inhibited, and yet “decent” and good-humoured. He had a strength of character which enabled him to carry out what he had been taught was his duty to do. He accepted and obeyed every English middle-class prejudice and taboo. What the English middle classes thought and did was right, and what anybody else thought and did was wrong. He was contemptuous of all foreigners. He appeared to have read nothing but Kipling, Geoffrey Farnol, Elinor Glynn, and the daily newspapers. He disapproved of Elinor Glynn, as too “advanced.” He didn’t care about Shakespeare, had never heard of the Russian Ballets, but liked to “see a good show.” He thought “Chu Chin Chow” was the greatest play ever produced, and the Indian Love Lyrics the most beautiful songs in the world. He thought that Parisians lived by keeping brothels and spent most of their time in them. He thought that all Chinamen took opium, then got drunk, and ravished white slaves abducted from England. He thought Americans were a sort of inferior Colonials, regrettably divorced from that finest of all institutions, the British Empire. He rather disapproved of “Society,” which he considered “fast,” but he held that Englishmen should never mention the fastness of Society, since it might “lower our prestige” in the eyes of “all these messy foreigners.” He was ineradicably convinced of his superiority to the “lower classes,” but where that superiority lay, Winterbourne failed to discover. Evans was an “educated” pre-war Public Schoolboy, which means that he remembered half a dozen Latin tags, could mumble a few ungrammatical phrases in French, knew a little of the history of England, and had a “correct” accent. He had been taught to respect all women as if they were his mother, would therefore have fallen an easy prey to the first tart who came along and probably have married her. He was a good runner, had played at stand-off half for his school and won his colours at cricket. He could play fives, squash rackets, golf, tennis, water-polo, bridge, and vingt-et-un, which he called “pontoon.” He disapproved of baccarat, roulette and_petits chevaux_, but always went in for the Derby sweepstake. He could ride a horse, drive a motor-car, and regretted that he had been rejected by the Flying Corps.