“That’s swank.”
“It is. You’d swank if you had been asked to play for the ‘Varsity. ‘Oh, Mr. Linnet,’ they said to me, they did, ‘will you come and play bat and ball with us? It would be nice of you, it would. Some boys from Middlesex are coming up to play against us, they are, and we will have such fun!’ So I said I would, I did, and I will. There’ll be three stumps one end and three stumps the other, and a lot of little popping creases. And I shall put my bat in front of my wicket, and hit the ball high, high up in the air, and they’ll all run to catch it together, and then dear little Birds will have made one run.”
“God!” said Jim. There really seemed very little else to say.
“After that——” began Birds again.
“Oh, shut it!”
“After that,” said Birds, not paying the slightest attention, “I shall pat the little popping creases with my little bat, and change hats with the umpire. And when they’re all ready again——”
“He’s drunk,” said Badders.
“I think it extremely unlikely: I am dead sober. Oh, I went to a lecture by Jackson to-day, and noticed for the first time that he had a green moustache. Why is that, I wonder?”
“Did he give you a billydux from Julia?”
“Yes. And told us a great deal about the Peloponnesian War that I really had no conception of before. No conception whatever, I assure you. The Peloponnese is shaped like a fig leaf, hence its name, and when Adam and Eve were turned out of the Paradise, and sent to the Vomitorio, as Jackson said——”