“I won’t live in Longwall,” affirmed Michael.
“Do you think you could find anybody else?”
“Why, have you got hold of some digs for three?” asked Michael hopefully. This would be a partial solution of the difficulty, as long as the third person was a tolerably good egg.
“No; well, as a matter of fact, Castleton rather wants to dig with me. The New College man he was going to live with is going down, and he had fixed up some rather jolly digs in Longwall. He offered me a share, but of course I said I was digging with you, and there’s no room for a third.”
“I can go in with Tommy Grainger and Lonny,” said Michael quickly.
“As long as you don’t feel I’ve treated you badly,” he began.
“That’s all right,” said Michael, resenting for the moment Maurice’s obvious idea that he was losing something by the defection. But as soon as he could think of Maurice unlinked to himself for a year, his fondness for him began to return and his habit of perpetually smoking cigarettes was less irritating. He accepted Maurice’s invitation to stay at Godalming in July with an inward amusement roused by the penitence which had prompted it.
Stella’s unexpectedly prompt departure to Vienna had left Michael free to make a good many visits during the Long Vacation. He enjoyed least the visit to High Towers, because he found it hard not to be a little contemptuous of the adulation poured out upon Maurice by his father and mother and sisters. Mr. Avery was a stockbroker with a passion for keeping as young as his son. Mrs. Avery was a woman who, when her son and her husband were not with her, spoiled the dogs, and sometimes even her daughters. She was just as willing to spoil Michael, especially when his politeness led him into listening in shady corners of the tennis-lawn to Mrs. Avery’s adorations of Maurice. He found Godalming oppressive with the smart suburbanity of Surrey. He disliked the facility of life there, the facile thought, the facile comfort, the facile conversation. Everything went along with a smoothness that suited the civilized landscape, the conventional picturesqueness and the tar-smeared roads. After a week Michael was summoned away by a telegram. Without a ruse, he would never have escaped from this world of light-green Lovat tweeds, of fashionable rusticity and carefully pressed trousers.