Hugo stirred uneasily, and said: "It's quite true what he says. It's cheek keeping us waiting like this for a quarter of an hour."
"To play with a baby," added Fred with scorn. It was the charge, so frequently brought, which had hurt him the year before. But it hurt him no longer. "I like playing with little Pam," he said. "So does Hugo sometimes, when you're not here. You'd like it too, if you weren't such a dirty scug."
This was the turning-point. Fred made another gesture of attack, but did not follow it up. If he had done so the battle would have been short and sharp, and whoever had won—it must have been he—bad blood would have been let off and the three boys would have settled down together. Instead, he turned to Hugo. "Really, that's a bit too much!" he said angrily. "Shall I teach him his lesson?"
Hugo rose. "Oh, let's chuck it," he said. "What's the good of scrapping when there's a game to play?"
They played their game, which none of them enjoyed. The contest had seemed to be quite indecisive, but Norman had won it hands down. It was Hugo, the weakest character of the three, who was the decisive factor. Fred deferred to him, and lost ground by doing so. Norman made no effort to gain ascendancy over him, being content with equal terms, but his ascendancy none the less became marked. Because he disliked Fred, finding something in him antagonistic to all the clean ideals in which he had been reared, Hugo came rather to dislike him too. Fred met this attitude with deprecation, which made matters worse. He began to be cold-shouldered, and towards the end of the holidays his society was as much as possible dispensed with.
The next time that Norman came to Hayslope, in the summer, Fred had made his ground good again, having become necessary to Hugo in the meantime. There was no quarrel this time, but Norman never liked Fred, and their intimacy was only on the surface. He didn't like Hugo much either, or wouldn't have liked him if he had known him at school among a lot of other boys. But there was some sense of relationship and he was part of Hayslope Hall and all its keen delights.
As the years of boyhood went by, the cousins remained friends in some sort. But Norman's lead became more pronounced. Hugo went to Harrow, which was his father's school. William Eldridge by this time had left the Bar to engage in commerce, and was already beginning to make money. Norman was sent to Eton. When he had been there a year his foot was on the ladder. He was one of those boys to whom success in school life comes naturally, while Hugo was a potential rotter, destined to remain in the ruck, unless he should emerge from it for some discreditable reason.
When Norman was fifteen and Fred nearly eighteen, the antagonism between them at last found its vent. Fred had grown into a lout of a boy, whose only saving grace was athleticism. He was already in his school eleven and fifteen, and Norman, though coming on well, was as yet far below those altitudes. Fred, uplifted by his successes, was not so careful now to conciliate him. He encouraged the worst side of Hugo, and had established an influence over him while Norman had been off the field. This always happened, but now Hugo did not gradually come over to Norman, as he had done before. His adolescence had brought him to Fred's unsavoury views of life and conduct. Fred was his chosen companion at Hayslope, in a way that Norman would never be.
Norman, an attractive, light-hearted boy, in the early years of his school life, was not without experience of evil, to which he had shut his eyes as much as possible. The talk of the two older boys offended and troubled him, but he did not at first combat it. He was parted from them by more than years. Hitherto they had all been boys together; now the other two were essentially men, of the baser sort, and he remained a boy, with a boy's clean distaste for what was as yet none of his business. He fell silent when they pursued their promptings, and presently began to withdraw himself from them.
Pamela had reached the age of nine. She was an engaging little sylph-like creature, with laughing, mischievous ways, and a bright intelligence beyond her years. She was quite fit to be a companion to Norman, and he took pleasure in her society. Judith was only a year younger, and companionable, too, in a more serious way. Alice and Isabelle were five and four. All of them loved Norman, who played childish games with them, and was entirely happy in doing so. But this brought on him some return of the treatment by which he had been made so unhappy during his first intercourse with Hugo and Fred together. It did not make him unhappy now, but contemptuous of them. Still, there was the fact that Norman's childhood still hung about him, while they had got rid of theirs; and no boy of fifteen likes having his youth emphasized, especially by those, rather older, with whom he desires to be on equal terms. Fred and Hugo held this advantage over him, which delayed the outbreak for some time.