Now Lonsdale was so obviously a Good Egg that it did not matter when he played with equal zest roulette and polo or hunted three times a week or wore clothes of the last extreme of fashion. But Michael and Grainger were not sure they cared very much for all of Lonsdale’s friends from the House. Certainly they were Etonians and members of the Bullingdon, but so many of their names were curiously familiar from the hoardings of advertisements that neither Michael nor Grainger could altogether believe in their assumption of the privilege of exclusion on the ground of inherited names.
“I think these Bullingdon bloods are rather rotters,” protested Michael, after an irritating evening of vacuous wealth.
“I _must_ ask them in sometimes,” apologized Lonsdale.
“Why?” rumbled Wedderburn, and on his note of interrogation the Bullingdon bloods were impaled to swing unannaled.
“I don’t think all this sort of thing is very good for the college,” debated Grainger. “It’s all very well for you, Lonny, but some of the second-year men behave rather stupidly. Personally I hate roulette at St. Mary’s. As for some of the would-be fresher bloods, they’re like a lot of damned cavalry subalterns.”
“You can’t expect the college to be handed over entirely to the rowing push,” said Lonsdale.
“That’s better than turning Venner’s into Tattersall’s,” said Wedderburn.
The effect of enlarging the inclusiveness of Good Eggery was certainly to breed a suspicion that it was largely a matter of externals; and therefore among the St. Mary’s men who disliked the application of money as a social standard an inclination grew up to suppose that Good Eggery might be enlarged on the other side. The feeling of the college, that elusive and indefinable aroma of opinion, declared itself unmistakably in this direction, and many Bad Men became Good Eggs.
“We’re all growing older,” said Michael to Wedderburn in explanation of the subtle change manifesting itself. “And I suppose a little wiser. Castleton will be elected President of the J.C.R. at the end of this year. Not Tommy Grainger, although he’ll be President of the O.U.B.C., not Sterne, although he’ll be in the Varsity Eleven. Castleton will be elected because he never has believed and he never will believe in mere externals.”