"He referred to your attack last summer, you know, after the Chantrey
affair."
Tommy grinned expansively.
"I expect the pater didn't know what it was," he said.
"But I did."
"You--you never told him?" in an anxious voice.
"No."
Tommy sighed.
"The pater does hate a chap being greedy, you see, and--those strawbobs
were so awfully good. I couldn't help it--an' father thought I'd got
a--intestinal chill, I think he said."
Tommy gave a passing moment to remembrance. Then he jumped up.
"I'm quite dry again," he said, looking down at me. "So I guess I'll hop
in."
The remark appeared to me slightly inconsequent, but Tommy laughed and
drew back under the shade of the tree. Then came a rush of white limbs,
and he was bobbing up again in the middle of the sunny pool.
"Well dived," I cried, encouragingly, but he looked a little
contemptuous.
"It was a jolly bad one," he said, "a beastly...." Delicacy forbids me
to record the exact word he used, but it ended with "flopper."
He crawled out again, and shook the water from his eyes.
"I say, won't you come in?" he cried eagerly. "It's simply grand in
there, and a gravel bottom."
But I am a man of careful habits, and sober ways, with a reputation for
some stateliness both of behaviour and bearing, and I shook my head.
Tommy urged again.
"It's not as if you were an old man," he cried.
The thought had not occurred to me. Age, in our little fraternity had
been a matter of but small interest. We had pursued the same routine of
gentle exercise, and dignified diversion, quiet jest and cultured
occupation, for so many years now, that we had seemed to be alike
removed from youth and age, in a quiet, unalterable, back-water of life,
quite apart from the hurrying stream of contemporary event.
No, I was certainly not an old man, unless a well preserved specimen of
forty-eight, with simple habits, can so be styled.
Tommy stood expectant before me, his bare feet well apart, a very
embodiment of young health, and, as I looked at him, a horrid doubt
crept into my mind--had I--could I possibly have become that most
objectionable of persons, a man in a groove?
"Do come," said Tommy.
"Don't be a fool," said Wisdom (only I was not quite sure of the
speaker).