Reggie had been performing this precarious feat with admirable steadiness for just nineteen years. Nature had gifted him with a pleasant face, and a healthy appetite had enabled him to show it to eminent advantage on the top of a tall body. He preferred talking to working, cricket to football, and lying in bed to “signing in” at 8 A.M. in the morning. He smoked a good many pipes every day, and blew smoke rings creditably. He played the piano a little, but his friends did not encourage him to take the necessary practice whereby he might play it any better. He was in fact perfectly normal, which is always the best thing to be.
“It’s a great bore, our being beaten,” he said, after a long pause, during which he had succeeded in blowing one smoke ring through another. “We were the best side really.”
“Of course we were, although we are blessed with a goal-keeper who hides behind the goal-posts, until a man has had his shot.”
“He stopped rather a hot one to-day.”
“Purely by accident. He peeped out from the goal-post too soon, and it struck him in the stomach. I hate being beaten by Pemmer, though I shouldn’t have minded if we’d lost to Trinity. The ground was in a filthy state too. One couldn’t get off.”
Reggie sighed.
“I’ve got to write to my father to-morrow,” he said, “and tell him my impressions of Cambridge. It will be a little difficult, because I haven’t got any.”
“Of course you haven’t. Only people in books have impressions. Describe the match to-day.”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t interest him.”
“Well, describe King’s Chapel.”