“Ugly thing!” said Joan, “what did you come here for? You’ve spoilt my holidays. Let go of my hand!... Let’s go in and do our tableau.”
And afterwards when Wilmington met Joan in the passage she treated him to a grimace that was only too manifestly intended to represent his own expression of melancholy but undying devotion. In the presence of others she was coolly polite to him.
Peter read his friend like a book, but refrained from injurious comment, and Wilmington departed in a state of grave nervous disarray.
A day passed. There was not much left now of the precious holidays. Came a glowing September morning.
“Joe-un,” whooped Peter in the garden—in just the old note.
“Pee-tah!” answered Joan, full-voiced as ever, distant but drawing nearer.
“Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”
“Right-o, Petah!” said Joan, and approached with a slightly prancing gait.
§ 11
Growing out of his Red Indian phase Peter moved up into the Lower Sixth and became a regular cynical man of the world with an air of knowing more than a thing or two. He was, in fact, learning a vast number of things that are outside the books; and rearranging many of his early shocks and impressions by the help of a confusing and increasing mixture of half-lights. The chaotic disrespect of the young went out of his manner in his allusion to school affairs, he no longer spoke of various masters as “Buzzy,” “Snooks,” and “the Croker,” and a curious respectability had invaded his demeanour. The Head had had him in to tea and tennis. The handle of the prefect’s birch was perhaps not more than a year now from his grip, if he bore himself gravely. He reproached Joan on various small occasions for “thundering bad form,” and when Wilmington came, a much more wary and better-looking Wilmington with his heart no longer on his sleeve, the conversation became, so to speak, political. They talked at the dinner-table of the behaviour of so-and-so and this-and-that at “High” and at “Bottoms” and on “the Corso”; they discussed various cases of “side” and “cheek,” and the permanent effect of these upon the standing and reputations of the youths concerned; they were earnest to search out and know utterly why Best did not get his colours and whether it was just to “super” old Rawdon. They discussed the question of superannuation with Oswald very gravely. “Don’t you think,” said Oswald, “if a school takes a boy on, it ought to see him through?”