“I may have been thinking that,” admitted John, blushing a little; “but you really haven’t been there, you know, and after the way you didn’t turn up the night he asked us to dine—”
“Turn up? Turn up?” said Billy, with a giggle at an imagined picture of himself turning up at the Victoria to dine with Haydock and John. “Why, man, I was dead to the world—I was a corpse! Turn up? I turned up about two days later, and didn’t know where I was then. If you had any gratitude in your withered old gizzard, you’d never stop thanking me for not turning up.”
“It wasn’t the right thing,” was John’s comment. The appearance just then of Dilly Bancroft, for whom Billy was waiting, averted the discussion—the one-sided kind Rice and Ware always had—in which Billy played matadore and picador, with grace and agility, to John’s brave but ineffectual bull.
“I’m all ready. Let’s dash along; you’re late, Dilly,” said Billy, slipping into his coat. He had a keen instinct in the matter of personal antagonisms. He always felt them long before they were expressed, often before they were even conceived. John had never said much of anything about Billy’s friend Bancroft—not even when that young man had seen fit to break training some months before, on the Freshman Eleven. But in spite of John’s hearty (suspiciously hearty, thought Billy), “Hello, Dilford, how are you?” Billy knew. Anything of the kind annoyed him—especially in his own room, where he felt it his right to have whom he pleased. He escaped with Bancroft as soon as possible. John struck him just then as a very tiresome person to be saddled with. The two left, looking so clean and well-bred and young and altogether inconsequent in their good clothes, that John could not but smile to himself and think kindly of them for a moment as they clattered down the stairs and out into the Yard.
Haydock was at home when Rice knocked at his door in Claverly later in the evening. It was always with a feeling of satisfaction that one went into Haydock’s study. Haydock himself had none of the disconcerting habits of most people. He never came to the door with an open book in one hand and a green shade over his eyes, protesting, with a worried expression, that you hadn’t stopped his work and spoiled his evening generally. He never shook you by the hand and seemed unnecessarily glad to see you. He never began the conversation by asking, after a stupid pause, the stupider question, “Well, how are you getting along?” It was impossible to feel that your arrival interrupted him in the least, as his door was usually unlatched, and he rarely seemed to be engaged in anything more urgent than filling his pipe, putting a fresh log on the fire, or perhaps strolling about looking at things,—occupations suggesting somehow, that Haydock had been trying to kill time until you should drop in. To-night he was improving the angle at which his various pictures hung.
“Do you suppose there ever was anything more maddening than a really conscientious ‘goody’?” he said, as John came in,—“the kind who has a passion for dusting, a positive lust for it? Just look at these pictures!” He straightened the photograph of a Florentine saint, whose asceticism, at a rakish deflection from the perpendicular, had ceased to impress.
“I don’t think we’re bothered very much by conscientious ‘goodies’ over in Matthews,” answered John; “one of them broke Billy’s pipe this morning.”
“Has William taken up smoking?” laughed Haydock.
“Surprising, isn’t it,” mused the other. He really wasn’t surprised a bit. He and Billy had been born and brought up next door to each other; he knew the type and the temperament. He also was aware that Billy was an enthusiastic member of the Polo Club.