"Hullo," he said, smiling a saintlike smile.
This scourge of humanity was a chunky kid whom a too-indulgent public
had allowed to infest the country for a matter of thirteen years.
His nose was snub, his eyes green, his general aspect that of one
studying to be a gangster. I had never liked his looks much, and with a
saintlike smile added they became ghastly to a degree.
I ran over in my mind a few assorted taunts. "Well, young Thos.," I
said. "So there you are. You're getting as fat as a pig."
It seemed as good an opening as any other. Experience had taught
me that if there was a subject on which he was unlikely to accept
persiflage in a spirit of amused geniality it was this matter of his
bulging tum.
On the last occasion when I made a remark of this nature, he had
replied to me, child though he was, in terms which I should have been
proud to have in my own vocabulary. But now, though a sort of wistful
gleam did flit for a moment into his eyes, he merely smiled in a more
saintlike manner.
"Yes, I think I have been putting on a little weight," he said gently.
"I must try to get a lot of exercise while I'm here. Won't you sit
down, Bertie?" he asked, rising. "You must be tired after your journey.
I'll get you a cushion. Have you cigarettes? And matches? I could bring
you some from the smoking room."
It is not too much to say that I felt baffled. In spite of what Aunt
Dahlia had told me, I don't think that until this moment I had really
believed there could have been anything in the nature of a sensational
change in this young plug-ugly's attitude toward his fellows. But now,
hearing him talk as if he were a combination of Boy Scout and delivery
wagon, I felt baffled. However, I stuck at it in the old bulldog way.
"Are you still at that rotten kids' school of yours?" I asked.
He might have been proof against gibes at his _embonpoint_, but it
seemed to me incredible that he could have sold himself for gold so
completely as to lie down under taunts directed at his school. I was
wrong. The money lust held him in its grip. He merely shook his head.
"I left this term. I'm going to Cheltenham next term."
"They wear mortar boards there, don't they?"
"Yes."
"With pink tassels?"
"Yes."
"What a priceless ass you'll look!" I said, but without much hope. And
I laughed heartily.
"I expect I shall," he said, and laughed still more heartily.
"Mortar boards!"
"Ha, ha!"
"Pink tassels!"
"Ha, ha!"