“You start cursing me because you haven’t any answer. Curse away, and come to blows if you like; you shan’t shift me out of this until I’ve said what I’ve got to say, not if I have to hang on to this bedstead and bring the place about our ears!” “Don’t be a fool, Chips,” said Jan, perceiving that he required self-control for two. “You know you’ve always had a down on Evan.” “Well, perhaps I have. Doesn’t he deserve it? What did he ever do for you your first term—though he’d known you at home?” “That was no reason why he should do anything. What could he do? We were in different houses and different forms; besides, I was higher up in the school, as it happened, as well as a bit older.” “That’s nothing; still I rather agree with you, though he was here first, remember. But what about your second term or my third? He overtook us each in turn, but did he ever go out of his way to say a civil word to either of us, though he’d known us both before?” “Yes; he did.” “Yes, he did! When you’d made a little bit of a name for yourself over the Mile he was out for a walk with you in a minute. That’s the fellow all over, and has been all the time. I remember how it was when you got in the Eleven, if you don’t!” But Jan did remember, and it made him think. Like most boys who are good at games, he had acquired in their practice great fairness of mind. He thought Chips was unfair to Evan, and yet he wanted to be fair to Chips, whom he recognised in his heart as by far the sounder fellow of the two. Chips was the loyal, unswerving, faithful friend who not only bore a friend’s infirmities but blew his trumpet as few would blow their own. But he had without doubt some of the usual defects of such qualities; he was touchy, he could be jealous, though Jan was not the one to tell him that; but on the touchiness he dwelt with a tact made tender by his own trouble. “The fact is, Chips, you’re such a good old chap yourself that you want everybody else to be the same as you. You wouldn’t hurt a fellow’s feelings, so you can’t forgive the chaps who do it without thinking. Not one in a hundred makes as much of things as you do, or takes things so to heart. But that’s because you’re what you are, Chips; you oughtn’t to be down on everybody who doesn’t happen to be built as straight and true.” “Don’t be too sure that I’m either!” exclaimed Carpenter, flinching unaccountably. “You’re only about the straightest chap in the whole school, Chips. Everybody knows that, I should think.”