Just now both the iron and the exuberance were relaxed, and David lay there in an abandonment of physical laziness. His straw hat, with cricket eleven colours, was tilted over the top part of his face, so as to shield his eyes from the speckles and sparkles of sun that filtered through the canopy of leaves above him, and his mouth and chin alone were visible. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, showing a white hiatus between a despondent sock and the end of his trousers, and a persistent fly kept settling there, an attention which he acknowledged by dabbing at it with the other ankle.
“’Tisn’t as if I was a little boy any longer,” he said. “When a fellow is close on seventeen, as you and I are, it’s time he began to realise that he’s grown up. Why, my mother was only seventeen when she married.”
“But do you propose to marry at seventeen?” asked Bags with sarcastic allusion to the conversation that had gone before. “Where’ll she live? She can’t very well sleep in dormitory.”
David gave a little spurt of laughter, and the sun shone on his white teeth, and down his red throat. But he quickly became grave again.
“Is that funny?” he said. “If so, I suppose I’d better laugh, though I wish I saw the point. Who said I was going to marry? O gosh, what a clipper she is!”
“And it’s not much more than a fortnight ago that you thought all girls were rotten,” said Bags.
“More fool me, then, and more fool you for still thinking so. Lord, I wish I was really grown up, quite old, I mean, nineteen or twenty. I say, do you think she looked at me at all in chapel this morning?”
“I don’t think so,” said Bags cheerily, “and I was watching her pretty nearly all the time, as I knew you would ask. Oh, yes, she did once, when you began to sing Amen before it was time. But she looked away again at once.”
“Ha, ha,” said David in a dry, speaking voice, not laughing at all. “Well, she’s bound to come to the Old Boys’ match, isn’t she? And I don’t see how she can help noticing if I take any wickets.”
“Nor if you get constantly hit out of the ground,” said Bags.