'Oh, no, my dear chap, but I'm going to try my luck with Monica next week. I want to talk intelligently to her father, so I've mugged up patent manures and the lost ten tribes till I'm blue in the face, and am not perfectly clear now whether it's the fertiliser or the tribes that's got mislaid. As they have family prayers and my knees do crack so abominably, I'm trying to get them a bit looser. It might prejudice my chances if they think I ain't used to kneeling down. What.'
'Well, you aren't, are you?' asked my brother.
'Well, no,' said Charlie, 'to be perfectly candid, I'm not—I get too much of it at home.'
'Which is the particular pill you never can swallow?' asked Ross.
'Virgin birth,' said Charlie. 'I think He was quite a good man, but I'm not prepared to say He was divine.'
'Are you prepared to say He was a humbug and the bastard son of Mary, then?' demanded Ross.
'No, not that either, quite,' said Charlie.
'Well, He must be one or the other, for there's nothing in between,' remarked my brother. 'Here, chuck over the cigarettes,' and the conversation changed rather hurriedly to Germans.
This morning when Charlie saw the Gidger he swore that Monica was not his fate. (I wonder if Michael would think him a suitable person on whom to bestow his daughter's hand in marriage as Charlie wants to wait for her.)
But before he went to the station, and I was alone with him for a little while, he let me see his soul for just a moment.