“Lord, what a lot of things there are!” he said appreciatively.
“No. Oh, by the way, I saw her coming out of Madden’s the photographer’s the other day. Do you suppose she’d been done? By Jove, shouldn’t I like one?”
“Well, ask her then,” said Bags with infinite patience.
David knitted his forehead into a diplomatic frown.
“I couldn’t straight off like that,” he said. “But I might lead up to it. I might say I thought Madden took jolly good photographs, and see what she said.”
“Suppose she said that she thought he didn’t,” said Bags wearily.
“Well, I could say that—that no one could do justice to some people. Or is that laying it on rather thick? Oh, by the way, I’ve been devilish cunning. The Head told me that my last iambics were pretty rotten, and that I’d better have some private tuition, so I asked if I might go to old Gray for it. Jolly smart, that. So I’m going to drop French and have private tu with Gray, beginning to-morrow.”
“‘Come into the garden, Maud,’” remarked Bags.
“What’s Maud got—oh, I see, you mean Violet. Yes, that’s the idea. Going in and out of the house, I’m sure to run across her. See? Why, it’s striking four. Let’s go down to house.”
David, as is the way of boys rising seventeen, had been growing tremendously these last six months, not in physical ways only, but in stature of the mind. It was impossible to imagine a boy less of a prig than he, or one so unweighted with the sense of duty or responsibility, but with his growth he had taken up his responsibilities quite simply and unconsciously and eagerly, without having any egoism about it. He did not, in fact, do these things and behave in a manner that made him so breezy a treasure to his house-master because he heavily realised that there were things he ought to do, and a manner in which he ought to behave, but because he obeyed unconsciously the bent of his natural instincts, which were those of a very high-spirited and excellent fellow now budding from boyhood into early manhood. He had no private meditations at all on the subject, but merely lived in active and wholesome ways and enjoyed himself immensely, and if by any chance he had come to learn what Adams really thought of him, he would have had no doubt that his informant was just “pulling his leg.” His genial unconsciousness that he had any influence at all was exactly that which made his influence so strong. He had the admirable gift of not thinking about himself, but purely about the large quantity of attractive affairs that made up life, and the number of “jolly chaps” with whom he was associated. He had even been known to admit that Manton and Crossley, to counteract whose ridiculous ineffectiveness the Court of Appeal had been founded, were decent enough, though of course no earthly good as prefects. In the same way, it was from no sense of conscious duty that he had educated and still watched over Jevons: “it was sport looking after a kid,” was exactly the true account of the trouble he had taken. Then, part of his growth, had come this violent adoration of Violet Gray, as natural as the strutting of the young male bird, when first it is conscious of another sex than his. David had suddenly perceived that though in many things girls are “rotters,” there was something about them that made it necessary to wear buttonholes, and, if possible, make runs or take wickets for other reasons than those generally necessary. . . .