“Bun!” Barry was quite shocked at the suggestion. “I can’t afford to get myself out of condition with beastly buns.”
“But if you aren’t playing——”
“You ass. I’m playing for the first. Now, do you see?”
M’Todd gaped. His mind never worked very rapidly. “What about Rand-Brown, then?” he said.
“Rand-Brown’s been chucked out. Can’t you understand? You are an idiot. Rand-Brown’s playing for the second, and I’m playing for the first.”
“But you’re——”
He stopped. He had been going to point out that Barry’s tender years—he was only sixteen—and smallness would make it impossible for him to play with success for the first fifteen. He refrained owing to a conviction that the remark would not be wholly judicious. Barry was touchy on the subject of his size, and M’Todd had suffered before now for commenting on it in a disparaging spirit.
“I tell you what we’ll do after school,” said Barry, “we’ll have some running and passing. It’ll do you a lot of good, and I want to practise taking passes at full speed. You can trot along at your ordinary pace, and I’ll sprint up from behind.”
M’Todd saw no objection to that. Trotting along at his ordinary pace—five miles an hour—would just suit him.
“Then after that,” continued Barry, with a look of enthusiasm, “I want to practise passing back to my centre. Paget used to do it awfully well last term, and I know Trevor expects his wing to. So I’ll buck along, and you race up to take my pass. See?”