“You didn’t like him?”
“Nobody does. He gives himself such ridiculous airs.”
“Does he?” said Constance. The information seemed to be of no interest to her. She asked for another cup of tea.
“Oh, Falloden of Marmion?” said Dr. Hooper. “I know him quite well. One of the best pupils I have. But I understand he’s the heir to his old uncle, Lord Dagnall, and is going to be enormously rich. His father’s a millionaire already. So of course he’ll soon forget his Greek. A horrid waste!”
“He’s detested in college!” Alice’s small face lit up vindictively. “There’s a whole set of them. Other people call them ‘the bloods.’ The dons would like to send them all down.”
“They won’t send Falloden down, my dear, before he gets his First in Greats, which he will do this summer. But this is his last term. I never knew any one write better Greek iambics than that fellow,” said the Reader, pausing in the middle of his cup of tea to murmur certain Greek lines to himself. They were part of the brilliant copy of verses by which Douglas Falloden of Marmion, in a fiercely contested year, had finally won the Ireland, Ewen Hooper being one of the examiners.
“That’s what’s so abominable,” said Alice, setting her small mouth. “You don’t expect reading men to drink, and get into rows.”
“Drink?” said Constance Bledlow, raising her eyebrows.
Alice went into details. The dons of Marmion, she said, were really frightened by the spread of drinking in college, all caused by the bad example of the Falloden set. She talked fast and angrily, and her cousin listened, half scornfully, but still attentively.
“Why don’t they keep him in order?” she said at last. “We did!” And she made a little gesture with her hand, impatient and masterful, as though dismissing the subject.