“Why don’t you wait for the morning papers?” I asked.
“Morning papers, indeed!” said Miss Grace witheringly. “How do you s’pose I’m going to get to sleep if I don’t know what the boys have done? Why, Archie might have bagged a brace, or Charlie might have got his hundred.”
“I didn’t think of that,” I said penitently. “But surely it’s not absolutely necessary for you to work out the averages every night, when by the payment of the ridiculously inadequate sum of one penny you can get trained journalists to do it for you?”
“Oh, I like to be knowing,” she said. “It’s not absolutely necessary, of course, but I can’t rest somehow till I’ve got the principal men reckoned up to date. That little beggar Bobby Abel will keep trying to get his nose in front of Archie, and then Albert Ward and Gunn are always treading on his heels. Then Tom Richardson and Briggs are putting in all they know to knock Charlie off his perch. It’s not all jam, I can tell you, having brothers who are such tremendous swells. All the world will keep looking at ’em, and if one of ’em’s a bit below himself, out comes the Daily Chronicle with a picture in five colours of A. H. Trentham’s deplorable exhibition at Old Trafford yesterday, and yarns of that sort. It comes jolly hard on a girl, I can tell you, Dimmy, if you’ve kept ’em on brine baths and a training diet all the week, and then one of ’em goes and blots his copy-book like that.”
“From what I hear,” said I, “it’s nothing but your diligence and motherly behaviour to ’em that’s made ’em as famous as they are.”
“I don’t say that,” remarked the modest Grace, but her expression said that this judicious statement was not unpleasing. “But I deserve a little bit of credit for their fame. The amount of watching that they take is something awful; Charlie in particular. At times Charlie’s just heart-breaking. Sometimes I can’t sleep for thinking of him!”
Had the best bowler at either ’Varsity since Sammy Woods been just then in my place and heard his sister’s long-drawn sigh and seen her pronounced tendency to tears, I’m certain that that robust sinner would have gone down on his knees before her and prayed for a remission of his sins. I think I never was more touched.
“What a shame!” said I.
“He’s so careless,” she said; “can’t restrain himself, you know; and he don’t feel his responsibilities a bit. He don’t care a pin about his average. ’Might be the ordinaryest bowler that ever was, instead of Charlie Trentham. Bought him a Whiteley exerciser for his birthday, but he uses all his spare time in whistling and playing ‘pills,’ instead of getting up his muscle and his stamina.”
“He must be a great trial,” said I, working the sympathetic vein for all that it was worth. I think, though, the Great Trial would have had a fit had he been privileged to hear me.