"Well, trot down and change, and then we'll go to the field and I'll run over your points at a net. We will see if you are as good a cricketer as you are a scholar. Stay and have some cake first. Perhaps you will excuse me if I smoke a pipe. Masters have their vices, you see. I haven't smoked for nearly three hours."
So the pair sat, Pip with a large piece of cake balanced delicately on his knee, morbidly anxious not to spill crumbs on the floor; and Hanbury lolling back in his armchair, smoking his pipe and surveying this sturdy youth before him, who knew every cricketer's average and had never heard of Cinderella.
As Pip was changing into flannels a few minutes later he encountered Mumford.
"Come to the grub-shop," said that hero.
"Can't," said Pip shortly. "Seen the comb anywhere?"
"Comb? What for?" said Mumford, who considered parting the hair during term-time an affectation.
"My hair, of course, silly swine," replied Pip, without heat.
"You must be cracked! Come to the grub-shop," reiterated his friend.
"Can't. Promised to go to a net with Ham."
And Pip, having worked up the conversation to this artistic climax, departed, leaving Mumford, who was not an athlete, in a state of incoherent amazement.