“You’re not forgetting,” I said anxiously; “you’re not forgetting, I hope, what this match means to me. You promised to give my claims the most serious consideration if I won, didn’t you?”
Grace’s reply was laughter. I sought to compensate my injuries a little by persuading myself that this ebullience on the part of Grace was in the worst possible taste. But this I knew to be a chimera, raised from the ruins of my self-esteem; for Grace was that forthright, fearless kind of soul who had only to do a thing to create the precedent for it. Somehow she seemed quite unable to lose her breeding for a moment, as, by some strange oversight, the science of snobbery had been omitted from her education altogether. Therefore she did not spend her time in committing the very solecisms that she strove most to avoid. Could she have been bred in England?
This trite reflection, Impatient Reader, is not really a digression, but is a device introduced to allow Grace full time to have her laugh out. When it was ended at last, I said mildly:—
“What’s the joke, Grace?”
“Why, the joke is that you’ve not got the slightest earthly, my dear chap,” said Grace. “Else do you think I’d have taken those absurd conditions?”
This was comforting in the extreme! It was no more than I deserved though. But my imperial Anglo-Saxon rose in all the majesty of his Rudyard Kipling.
“All right,” said I; “but this is going to be no walk over. I’m going all the way, I can tell you, Grace. A game’s never won till it’s lost.”
“I’m glad you’re cheerful,” said Grace, “’cause your gruelling’ll be so prime that you’ll want a dreadful lot of cheerfulness. It just makes me shudder to think what’ll happen to you, Dimmy.”
“You can’t intimidate me,” said I; “you can’t make me funk you.”
“That’ll come later,” said Grace, “when you go on to bowl!”