Oliver was perfectly aware that he could never be what Jack called ‘a dab’ of a soldier, but he was not sure that Jack would not like him the better for his defects. It would be a great nuisance and fatigue to Oliver to walk and hold himself straight and still, like other men, and not to be perpetually in disgrace, but he might try what he could accomplish in bodily self-restraint. It would be what moralists would call ‘good discipline’ for him, at any rate. At the same time he remembered, and even reminded Fan of what he had said to her on the evening of his coming home, as to his being out of place in a barrack yard. Fan was not too generous to refrain from assenting with grave irony, though she had no particular objection to his joining the company of volunteers, which included men of all ranks, if only Oliver had asserted his claims and got a commission—not put himself on a level with young Dadd. ‘Jack Dadd is odious,’ Fan had said with effusion to Oliver one day, as she recalled the young draper’s loud trousers, tight boots, and ‘light kids,’ when he figured as a ‘Sunday swell.’ Fan also cherished lively recollections of what she had suffered from Jack Dadd on the occasion of a party at the Polleys, which she had been forced to attend soon after leaving school. Jack would not be kept at a distance by any effort of girlish majesty, and when he had happened to sit next to her, he had presumed to administer sundry nudges with his elbow to emphasise points in his conversation, without regard to her stony disregard of the signals. ‘Not a bit,’—Oliver denied the odiousness stoutly; ‘Dadd is not half a bad fellow; he is manly in his way, and though that way may not be good form,’ reflected Oliver, falling inadvertently into school slang, ‘it is not altogether his fault, poor beggar.’