“There or thereabouts. Come on, you lazy hog.”
Birds threw an arm round Jim’s neck.
“Lazy I am; hog I am not,” he observed. “Jim, what’s to happen to us? What’s it all going to be about? Shall we always go on like this?”
“I hope so. Don’t you? I don’t see what else I want.”
“No, but Cambridge will come to an end, and we shall go our ways, I suppose. Some day we shall meet each other, and find that we’ve drifted away. You’ll be father of one family, and I shall be father of another, and we shall look at each other and wonder if it really could have been we who sat on the bridge at midnight or a good deal after, and didn’t want anything else.”
“Rot,” said Jim.
“I wish I thought it was.”
“But it is. Can’t explain it properly, but I know it is. Perhaps——”
Jim thought a moment, as they drifted on to the grass again.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Whatever happens to us afterwards, this, the fact of you and me being friends, will be part of us. It’s built into us; we couldn’t get rid of it if we wanted to. We should have been other sorts of fellows if we hadn’t tumbled into each other, but now we’re just the sort we are.”