"I'm not."
"All right; I'll take that back. You're not a funk, Cæsar, but you're so easily humbugged. Warde caught you with his 'pi jaw' and a glass of gooseberry."
"The champagne was all right, wasn't it?"
"Oh, ho! So you do mean to stand in with Warde against Lovell and me? Thanks for being so candid. Now I'll be candid with you. I like Lovell. There's no nonsense about him. He don't put on frills because he's in the Sixth, and he don't mean to take to their sneaking, spying ways. He's just as anxious as Warde to see the Manor cock-house at footer and cricket, and I'm as keen as he is; but we stop there. The Balliol Scholarship may go hang. And as for sympathy and fellowship and pulling together between masters and boys, I never did believe in it, and never shall. My hand is against the masters, so long as they interfere with anything I want to do. I like bridge, and I mean to play it. And I'll take jolly good care that I'm not nailed. That's part of the fun, as the drinking used to be. I chucked that because it wasn't good enough; but bridge is ripping, and, take my word for it, you'll be keener than I when you begin."
"Perhaps. But I'm not going to begin here."
"Right—oh!"
Scaife turned aside, whistling, but out of the corner of his shrewd eye he marked the expression of Desmond's face, the colour ebbing and flowing in the round, boyish cheeks, the perplexity on the brow. Then he spoke in a different voice.
"Don't worry, old chap. You've stuck to me through thick and thin, and I'm grateful, really and truly. You're right, and I'm wrong; I always am wrong. I was looking forward to larks. If you count 'em purple sins, I don't blame you for letting me go to the devil by myself."
"I never said bridge was a purple sin."
"Warde thinks it is. If you're going to look at life here with his eyes, you'll have to rename things. Babies play Beggar my Neighbour for chocolates; why shouldn't we play bridge for a bob a hundred? The game is splendid for the brain; ten thousand times better than translating Greek choruses."