Then suddenly Traill and Perrin both rose from the floor. Traill's lip was cut and bleeding—coffee was on Perrin's collar; their faces were very white.
For a moment they looked at each other in absolute silence, then they passed, without a spoken word, through the open door.
In such a way, and from such a cause, did this Battle of the Umbrella have its beginning.
Let us credit the gods with interest sufficient, and we see that it had been their pleasant amusement to beguile those tedious Olympian hours with a game; and to the onlooker, here is comedy enough, for about what simpler can mortals dispute than this green umbrella? But for others, more nearly concerned, there is some question of tragedy involved.
CHAPTER VIII—THE BATTLE OP THE UMBRELLA; CAMPS ARE FORMED—ALSO SOME SKIRMISHING
I.
ISABEL DESART heard about it early on the afternoon of the same day. Traill himself told her as he stood with her for a moment outside the school gates before he went down to football.
She saw it at once more seriously than he did; his attitude had been that it was a pity, above all that it was indecorous, that he had, in a way, made a fool of himself—that to struggle in that fashion with a man like Perrin before an audience was a pity. But to her it was a great deal more than this. In many ways she was older than Archie Traill, and her feminine intuition helped her now; she saw Perrin as something to be feared and also something to be pitied, and she did not know which of these feelings was the stronger. She had always seen Perrin as someone to be pitied—that was the reason of her kindness to him—and now that he was ludicrous, now that his climax had made him prominent, her pity for him was increased.