“No end of a blood,” Carben went on. “Lights bonfires and gets fined all in his first week.”
The two freshmen sniggered, and Michael made up his mind to consult Lonsdale about their doom. He was pensively damned if these two asses should laugh at him. There had already been talk of ragging one or two freshmen whose raw and mediocre bearing had offended the modish perceptions of the majority. When the proscription was on foot, Michael promised his injured pride that he would denounce them with their red wrists and their smug insignificance.
“You were at St. James’, weren’t you?” asked Jones. “Did you know Mansfield?”
“I didn’t know him—exactly,” said Michael, “but—in fact—we thought him rather a tick.”
“Thanks very much and all that,” said Jones. “He was a friend of mine, but don’t apologize.”
There was a general laugh at Michael’s expense from which Carben’s guffaw survived. “Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,” he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was something positively contemptible.
Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with cold dislike the constellated pimples on Carben’s face. Meanwhile the others exercised their scornful wit upon the “bloods” of the college.
“Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?” Carben indignantly demanded. “Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. ‘Can’t you keep your fat little paunch down? I don’t want to look at it,’ said Fitzroy. That’s pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man in front of a lot of freshers. Gingold’s going to jack rowing, and he’s quite right.”
“Quite right,” a chorus echoed.
Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.; he remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion of wrath at the insult offered to Gingold’s dignity irritated Michael. He felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he thoroughly deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was probably as offensive as Jones and Carben.