"That wasn't quite the point," said Bingham. "The point was whether the stay-at-homes should fill up their stomachs, or turn it into cash for war purposes."
"Of course," sneered Harding, "you like to put it in that way."
"It isn't any man's business," broke in Boreham, "whether another man can or can't judge what's good for him."
Boreham had been getting up steam for an attack upon Christ Church because it was ecclesiastical, upon Balliol because it had been Bingham's college, and upon Oxford in general because he, Boreham, had not been bred within its walls. In other words, Boreham was going to speak with unbiassed frankness. But this sudden deviation of the talk to claret and Harding's cool assumption that his view was like his host's, could not be passed in silence.
"What I say is," said Harding again, "that when a man gets to my age——"
"Age isn't the question," interrupted Boreham. "Let every man have his own view about drink. Mine is that I'm not going to ask your permission to drink. If a man likes to get drunk, all I say is that it's not my business. The only thing any of your Bishops ever said that was worth remembering was: 'I'd rather see England free than England sober.'"
Harding allowed that the saying was a good one. He nodded his head. Bingham sipped his claret. "You do get a bit free when you're not sober," he said sweetly. "I say, Harding, so you would rather see Mrs. Harding free than sober!"
Harding made an inarticulate noise that indicated the place to which in a future life he would like to consign the speaker.
"Every man does not get offensive when drunk," said Boreham, ignoring, in the manner peculiar to him, the inner meaning of Bingham's remark.
"That's true," said Bingham. "A man may have as his family motto: 'In Vino Suavitas'(Courteous though drunk, Boreham); but when you're drunk and you still go on talking, don't you find the difficulty is not so much to be courteous as to be coherent? In the good old drinking days of All Souls, of which I am now an unworthy member, it was said that Tindal was supreme in Common Room because 'his abstemiousness in drink gave him no small advantage over those he conversed with.'"