"Probably not," I replied; "I should think he hears far too many people
jawing. I hope he makes me feel like a convict, and then I shall
behave myself all right, but a silence at a meal gives me fits."
"Miss Davenport is never silent," Murray asserted. "If she can talk
about pork, you may guess she has plenty to say. The Warden looks at
her in a forgiving sort of way--as if he knows she is talking rot, but
can't help herself."
"They must be a funny pair. You don't think I shall laugh, do you?" I
asked.
"I didn't feel like laughing. I never thought of it in that way, but
it couldn't strike you as being funny while you are there."
"I don't know," I said; "I think I had better be ill on Tuesday." But
then I remembered I had got to play footer, and I chucked the card over
to Murray.
"I've got to play in this thing, too. The Warden kicks you out about
two, so it will be all right. You simply must go. Where have you been
to this afternoon?"
"I walked to Sampford with Foster, and we had a row there with two men,
not much of a row. I must go and see Ward." I jumped up, but the
chapel bell began to ring, and I had to postpone seeing him.
"I am all behind with my chapels and roll-calls," I said to Murray;
"this will be my twenty-first, and five weeks of the term have gone."
"I kept six chapels last week," Murray answered; "you will have to go
hard to keep nineteen in three weeks."
"I mean doing it and getting up very early in the morning. I am going
to reform," and I left him at the chapel door, for he, being a scholar,
sat in the seats behind all of us who were commoners or exhibitioners.
After chapel, at which the Regius Professor of Divinity preached and
told us that Sunday luncheon parties were very wrong, I seized Ward and
bore him off to his rooms, where we found Dennison sitting by the fire
with his legs stuck up on the mantelpiece. I wanted to see Ward alone,
but Dennison had been at Sampford, so he did not matter much, though
Ward with Dennison never seemed to be quite the same as he was without
him.
Dennison twisted round in his chair, and as soon as he saw me he began
to talk. "You ought to have been with us this afternoon," he said, "we
had a most lovely rag. Bunny Langham took us over to Sampford in his
cart, and I had a peashooter."
The loveliness of the rag was too much for him, and he had to stop his
account of it so that he might laugh. I looked at Ward, and although
he did not appear to be very amused, he showed no signs of knowing that
Foster and I had been at Sampford.
"After lunch," Dennison went on, "I discovered some people in an
arbour, the bill and coo business, and I fairly peppered them; I am no
end of a shot with a peashooter."
"You missed them about a dozen times," Ward put in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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