Jack, down at Chatham, was much too busy with his books, and such practical application of them as could be had there, to give a thought to the more frivolous side of things.
Jim, cast into what was to him the whirl of London--though his grandfather would have viewed it scornfully over a depreciatory pinch of snuff, with something of the feelings of an old lion turned out to amuse himself in a kitchen garden--Jim found this new free life of the metropolis very delightful and somewhat intoxicating.
Harrow had been a vast enlargement on Carne. London was a mightier enfranchisement than Harrow.
But first of all he was a soldier, very proud of his particular branch of the service, and bent on fitting himself for it to the best of his limited powers.
In the first flush of his boyish enthusiasm he worked hard. His horsemanship was above the average; his swordsmanship, by dint of application and constant practice, excellent; and he slogged away at his drill and a knowledge of the handling of men as he had never slogged at anything before.
He bade fair to become a very efficient cavalryman, and meanwhile found life good and enjoyed himself exceedingly.
His wide-eyed appreciation of this expansive new life appealed to his fellows as does the unbounded delight of a pretty country cousin to a dweller in the metropolis. They found fresh flavour in things through his enjoyment of them, and laid themselves out to open his eyes still wider.
His enthusiasm for their common profession was in itself a novelty. They decided that all work and no play would, in his case, result in but a dull boy, as it would have done in their own if they had given it the chance; and so, whenever opportunity offered--and they made it their business to see that it was not lacking--they carried him off among the eddies and whirlpools of society and insisted on his enjoying himself.
But, indeed, no great insistence was necessary. Jim found life supremely delightful, and savoured it with all the headlong vehemence of his nature.
He had never dreamed there were so many good fellows in the world, such multitudes of pretty girls, such endless excitements of so many different kinds. Life was good; and Jack, deep in his studies at Chatham, And Charles Eager, busy among his simple folk up north, alike wagged their heads doubtfully over the hasty scrawls which reached them from time to time with exuberant but sketchy accounts of his doings, always winding up with promises of fuller details which never arrived.