He was not much more successful in introducing the subject of sport. To most British schoolboys, of the upper classes at all events, sport is a subject of fascinating and absorbing interest. Not to be a sportsman is in their eyes not to be an English gentleman. There is a story that a clever schoolmaster, who was conscientiously opposed to vivisection, offered a prize to any boy who should come back to school after the summer holidays without having killed any living creature; and the prize was not claimed, probably not because there was no boy in the school who had not handled either a gun or a rod in the holidays, but because there was not a boy bold enough to admit in the presence of his schoolfellows that he had spent the holidays in so unsportsmanlike a manner. But the 12th of August and the 1st of September were only common days to Gerald Eversley; they enjoyed no mystical significance in his eyes. Mr. Eversley, his father, was not a sportsman; he had neither the means nor the taste for ‘killing’ (as he would himself have said) ‘God’s dumb creatures.’ To say the truth, it is probable that he felt, like Sir Thomas More, a secret astonishment at finding that so many sober, responsible, Christian gentlemen experienced a pleasure or exhibited a pride in the magnitude of their slaughter. So it was that Gerald Eversley had never thought of handling a gun. A gunshot was apt to send a tremor through his body. It happened once that, as he was walking with a book of poetry in his hand in the covert immediately adjoining a part of his father’s glebeland, he came upon a number of pheasants that the keepers who were out with a shooting party had left--bedraggled, bleeding, some of them hardly yet dead--to be picked up in the evening when the day’s sport was finished. The sight was so painful that he turned away from it as if it sickened him, and the tears came into his eyes, and he wondered if any satisfaction derived from killing these beautiful creatures could be greater than his in being innocent of their blood. It was not much use, then, to talk to Gerald Eversley about sport; the subject was unwelcome to him, and Harry Venniker instinctively dropped it.