“Hullo, Toddles!” he observed. “What price that? ’Nother victim. I’m getting to recognise the symptoms straight away. But, Dimsdale, you be advised. The Rectory positively reeks of slaughtered innocence. Two refused last week. Now, don’t you come and play the goat.”
“Wonder who it will be in the end?” asked the poor dear Optimist to cover my retreat. But his own effort was a perfect masterpiece of self-repression.
“Perhaps the noble Earl,” said the little parson. “He’s been right over his ears this two years. Poor old Dick!”
“No blooming fear!” said Miss Grace’s brother, with a profound conviction that both delighted and depressed the poor old Optimist and the miserable me. “Dick’s a rank outsider. ’Hasn’t a thousand-to-one chance. Last time he tried it on he sank so low as to tell her what his income was. ‘Now, look here, Dick,’ said she, ‘I don’t care a straw about your income; what’s your batting average?’ Fact! Told it to the ’Varsity, and they put it in The Granta. And the joke is, that Dick is the most horrible muff you ever saw. ’Couldn’t get a run to save his life. Well, he sent for Attewell and Brockwell to coach him all the spring. But he’s not yet at the top of the first-class averages.”
“Well, who will it be?” I asked recklessly.
“Ask another,” said Charlie, “for I’m hanged if I know. Ranji in his best year might have had a look in, and I think she’d take the Old Man even now. Jacker, and Stoddy, and Archie McLaren, and that crush, all just miss it.”
“All just miss it?” I said weakly.
“All just miss it,” said Charlie magisterially. “If Sammy Woods’s heart had stood the strain, his bowling might have put him in the running, because she says that, whereas batsmen are a common growth, bowlers come from heaven.”
As the best bowler in England quoted this opinion, the twinkle in his eye was marvellous.
“But Jack Mason and Charlie Fry have been going pretty strong of late,” said the little parson.