“You want a clean—” began Reggie slowly in a tone of virulent condemnation. But being unable to finish his sentence in an adequately insulting manner, he left Jack’s deficiencies to the imagination.
“He wants a clean pipe,” remarked Ealing. “It sounds like a kettle boiling.”
Jack shut up his book and yawned.
“You fellows are beastly funny,” he said. “I’m going back to Trinity to work. For why? I am dining with the Babe to-night.”
“The Babe has got markedly madder and several years younger since last term,” said Ealing. “And he was neither sane nor old to begin with. Tell him so with my love. Or I dare say Reggie and I will come round later.”
“Do. It is November the fifth. The Babe observes all feasts, whether civil or ecclesiastical. He says it would be a thousand pities to let these curious old customs lapse into disuse.”
“I wish the Babe wouldn’t use such beautiful language,” said Ealing.
“He only does it in his less lucid intervals. Good-bye. I’ll tell him you’re coming round about ten.”
Jack picked up his hat and stick and went off to his rooms in Trinity, where till half-past seven he drifted helplessly about like a ship-wrecked mariner, to whom no sail breaks the limitless horizon, in Thucydides’s graphic account of the Peloponnesian war. To Jack, however, it appeared that its chief characteristic was its length, rather than its interest, a criticism, the truth of which is rendered more and more probable every year by an enormous mass of perfectly independent, unbiassed critics. But being a short and stout young man, by no means infirm of purpose, he regarded that merely as a reason the more for beginning at once.
Reggie Bristow and Ealing sat on for an hour or so by the fire. They were old friends, and so they did not need to talk much. Reggie was a year the younger of the two, and he was now half-way through his first term at King’s. They had been at Eton five years together, where they had both extracted a good deal of amusement out of life, and perhaps a little profit. They were both exceedingly healthy, to judge by the superficial standards of examinations, rather stupid, and, in the opinion of those who knew them, on a much more important matter, very liveable-with. Furthermore, they both played games rather well, and, as was right, neither of them ever troubled his head about abstract questions of any sort or kind. Living was pleasant, and they proceeded to live.