“Good Lord, no. . . . We play rugger. We’re pretty good.”
“Who do you play?”
“Merchant Taylors and St. Paul’s, and one or two others.”
“H’m. . . . They’re day schools, aren’t they? Is St. Luke’s that sort?”
Edwin, with enthusiasm, expounded the St. Luke’s legend, that nobody outside of St. Luke’s has ever been known to believe. Martin, meanwhile, looked a little supercilious and bored. He spoke as from a distant world in a tone that implied that the people of North Bromwich could never call each other by their Christian names or hunt or race or play practical jokes with an air of being born to it.
“I expect we’re a pretty mixed lot here,” he said.
And Edwin, with the guilty consciousness of being more than a little mixed himself, replied: “Yes.”
“An extraordinary collection. That great dark fellow looks an absolute tyke. Then there’s the chap with the waistcoat—”
“Yes. . . . Harrop was the name.”
“I don’t know the name,” said Martin dubiously. “Never heard of the family. He was wearing an Oriel tie.”