“It’s a wonder to me, you know,” said Pledge, turning his back and looking out of the window, “that your new angelic friends don’t somehow do it for you. There’s Mansfield, you know. One word from his lips would do the business. Everyone knows he never did anything low.”
“Mansfield never speaks to me,” said Georgie, more for the sake of saying something than because he considered the fact important.
“Really! How ungrateful of him, when you have been the means of enabling him to kick me out of the Sixth. Very ungrateful!”
“I never had anything to do with that,” said Georgie.
“No! You don’t, then, believe a fellow can make use of you without your knowing it. You can’t imagine Mansfield saying to his dear friends, ‘I’d give anything to get at that wicked Pledge, but I daren’t do it straight out. So I must pretend to be deeply interested in that little prig, Heathcote, and much concerned lest he should be corrupted by his wicked senior. That will be a fine excuse for having a slap at Pledge. I’ll take away his fag, and then, of course, he’ll resign, and we shall get rid of him!’”
“I don’t believe he really said that,” said Heathcote, colouring up.
“‘And then,’ he would say, ‘to bribe the youngster over, and keep him from spoiling all and going back to his old senior, we’ll manage to fool him about our precious new Club, and put his name on the list.’”
This was rousing Georgie on a tender point.
“If my name gets on the list, it will be because Dick and Coote and I ran through the hunt; that’s why!” he said, rather fiercely.
“Ha, ha! If they could only humbug everybody as easily as they do you. So you are really going to get into the Club?”