He was walking towards them with a swagger of his long yellow neck and his thin leggy body that Jeremy found especially offensive. Jeremy “bristled,” and Mary was conscious of that bristling.
“Hallo!” said Ernest.
“Hallo!” said Jeremy.
“What rot these silly games are!” said Ernest. “Why can't they have something decent, like cricket?”
Jeremy had never played cricket, so he said nothing. “At our school,” said Ernest, “we're very good at cricket. We win all our matches always—”
“I don't care about your school,” said Jeremy, breathing through his nose.
The Dean's Ernest was obviously surprised by this; he had not expected it. His pale neck began to flush.
“Look here, young Cole,” he said, “none of your cheek.”
This was a new dialect to Jeremy, who had no friends who went to school. All he said, however, breathing more fiercely than before, was: “I don't care—”
“Oh, don't you?” said Ernest. “Now, look here—” Then he paused, apparently uncertain, for a moment, of his courage. The sight of Mary's timorous anxiety, however, reassured him, and he continued: “It's all right for you, this sort of thing. You ought to be in the nursery with your old podge-faced nurse. Kids like you oughtn't to be allowed out of their prams.”