"I meant lady friends." "I haven't got any," said Pip glumly. "You should speak the truth," said his companion with some acerbity. "How about Miss Carr?" Pip glanced at her; and then, moved by an impulse which he did not quite understand at the time, he said, with sudden and unwonted heat,-- "I never wish to set eyes on Miss Carr again." After this outburst they walked on silently, till they came to a house in Sussex Gardens. "I live here," said Miss Innes. "Good-bye, and thank you so much for bringing me home." They shook hands. "When shall I see you again?" said Pip regretfully. The girl smiled at his frank seriousness. "Lord's, on Monday," she said. "Come and see me in the luncheon hour, or before, if Cambridge is batting." "I say," said Pip gruffly, "aren't you rather taking things for granted?" "You mean your coming to see me?" "Gracious, no!" cried Pip in genuine distress. "I meant about my playing." Elsie Innes looked him straight in the face. "Pip," she said, "do you wear gloves?" Pip extended two enormous palms and inspected them doubtfully. "Sometimes," he said--"at weddings." "Very good. I'll bet you ten pairs of gloves to one that you get your Blue." "Don't!" said Pip appealingly. "You couldn't afford it. I take nines." "My size," said Miss Innes, "is six-and-a-quarter. White kid--eight buttons. Good-bye!" She turned and vanished into the recesses of the hall, a receding vision of white frock, glinting hair, and black bow. After Pip had walked down two streets and halfway across a square, he stopped suddenly and dealt his leg a blow with a tennis-racquet that would have maimed an ordinary limb for life. "By gad," he cried to a scandalised pug-dog which was taking the evening air on an adjacent doorstep, "she called me Pip!" * * * * * Next morning he received a communication from the authorities of the Cambridge University Cricket Club. An hour later he was being shepherded, scarlet in the face, by a posse of stentorian shopwalkers, through an embarrassing wilderness of ladies' hosiery to the Glove Department of an establishment in Oxford Street. BOOK TWO THE MAKING OF A MAN CHAPTER VII A CRICKET WEEK I BY the time that Pip had reached his twenty-fifth year his name was scarcely less familiar to the man in the street than that of the leading picture-postcard divinity, and considerably more so than that, say, of the President of the Royal Academy. The English are a strange race, and worship strange gods. Pip's admission to the national Pantheon had been secured by the fact of his having been mainly responsible for the sensational dismissal of the Australians, for an infinitesimal score, in the second innings of the third Test Match.