So The Bradder and Nina went to Chipping Norbury without me, and he stayed for three more days, by which time even my father did not want him to go, though he talked to my mother about him as one of those misguided young men who want England to stand on its head just to see what it would look like. I found out afterwards that The Bradder described my father to some one as a mixture of cayenne pepper and kindness, and, since there was no harm in it, I passed it on. "I won't have people making up these things about me," he said, but he chuckled, and I am sure he liked the cayenne pepper part of the mixture. CHAPTER XX THE HEDONISTS Fred Foster's people came back from India during the summer, and he spent all the vac with them, though I tried to make him come to us for the shooting. He had, however, got an idea that Nina did not want him, and nothing I could do was successful in removing it. I told him that Nina had been greatly improved by Paris; I did not like the expression, but I did not see why he should think it ridiculous. Still, if he meant to be obstinate it was no use wasting time in writing letters at which he gibed, so I left him alone. Jack Ward managed to appease his father, and having done it he set out on a campaign which for thoroughness beat anything I have ever discovered. He went off at the end of July to stay with a tutor who coached him in history and rowing, and he stayed with him until the Oxford term began. The tutor was a rowing blue who did not, from Jack's account of him, mind how little work his pupils did as long as they were ready to go on the river, but Jack assured me that he had read for four or five hours every day. To start with a history coach two years before his schools struck me as being magnificent, but Jack would not hear a word against his way of spending the vac. "He may not know much history," he said to me when we got back to Oxford, "but he's a rare good sort, and he says I'm a natural oar. Besides, he's a sportsman." "What's that?" I asked, for I used the word "sportsman" to mean so many things. "He doesn't bother people; you can play cards if you like, and he has a billiard table. He is a nailer at cork pool." "Is he?" I said, and asked no more about him, for I have a horror of nailers at any sort of pool, having once been hopelessly fleeced by some of them. "I won a pot," Jack went on gaily, "in the scratch fours at Wallhead regatta--I rowed in two regattas. Not so bad; and now I've got to go down to the river every day and be coached by men who don't know the difference between an oar and a barge pole. Well, it's all part of the game." "What's the game?" I asked.