CHAPTER V
When Ross and I were fifteen we got to know a topping boy named Charlie Foxhill. He is amphidextrous. His father is most frightfully rich. He made his money in cement, but this is never mentioned because Mrs Foxhill is the daughter of an impecunious peer, and she is as proud as the cement is hard. The Foxhills came to live in the next village to ours. My great friend, Monica Cunningham, lives there too, at least she is there sometimes. Her father is a baron, but you would never know it to look at him. He takes a great interest in patent manures and the ten lost tribes.
Charlie is two years older than Ross, but so much shorter that they seem the same age. He is an agnostic. His mother has driven him to it, she is so 'steeped in saints.'
'It's bad enough to be steeped in poets like my sister,' said Ross, 'but saints! I never can imagine how people can stomach all that crowd. They bore me stiff. The only one I like is the chap that finds lost things.
'St Elian?'
'Fat lot you know about saints, Foxhill,' remarked my brother politely.
'I know an awful lot; I've not lived with my mother for nothing,' said Charlie lugubriously.
'Well, I never could see that a saint was anything more than a dead sinner,' remarked my brother, 'and some of them make a perfect nuisance of themselves—look at St Vitus.'
'Oh,' I giggled, but my brother was wound up and ignored my interruption.
'And St Swithin—isn't he the absolute limit? Look how he mucks the summer up if he gets the chance! All because he thought he was going to be buried where he didn't want to be—keeping the feud up all these years, too.'