Bags groaned slightly. It really was appalling for David to be in this deplorable state.
“Violet Gray,” he said, in a business-like manner. “H’m, Violet Gray! I think it sounds better than Violet Blaize.”
“Bags, you don’t understand one single thing about it,” he said. “How can I explain? She’s just the most wonderful and beautiful thing that ever happened. I wonder if Frank will understand. I shall tell him, but nobody else. He’s coming down end of next week.”
“He’ll probably cut you out,” said Bags, who thought a bracing treatment was best for his idiotic friend.
“Not he: we’re pals. Of course he could if he wanted, since any girl would fall in love with Frank straight off, if he held up his little finger. Jove, I’d give anything to see the ’Varsity cricket-match this week. And to think that in final house-match last year I was in at one end, and a Cambridge cricket blue the other.”
“Well, that happened to everybody else in the house-eleven,” said Bags, “since Maddox went in first and carried his bat!”
“So it did,” he said. “I’ll back you against any one in the world, Bags, for bald literal prosaicness. You haven’t got an ounce of imagination. You see things just exactly as they happen. You’ve less of romance than—than a horse-roller,” he said, looking round for inspiration and seeing that useful article with its shafts in the air.
“Perhaps I have, perhaps I haven’t,” said Bags. “But it’s perfectly true I don’t jaw about it. Never mind that. Look here: supposing you might either kiss Violet Gray, twice, we’ll say, or see the Oxford and Cambridge match, which would you choose?”
“Depends on the match,” said David. “Of course if Frank was going to make a century, and I were to see him do that, I don’t know what else I could choose. O Lord, but fancy kissing her, though! I wish you wouldn’t ask such stumpers. But that’s you all over. You want me to be practical, and say which I should like best. But I just can’t! I—I feel like a dog which is being whistled to from opposite directions by two fellows it loves. Doesn’t know which way to go.”
“Oh, you’ve not got it so desperately, if you only feel like that,” he said.
David shut his eyes and made his mouth tight with an air of martyr-like determination.