August, as father’s in residence. You’re a ripper, all right, but then you’re a girl. I expect you can’t help. I’ll come and play cricket if you like.”
“I don’t,” said Margery. “Go on.”
“I don’t suppose you would understand,” said the superior sex, “but you see I’ve got to start again. It’s scuggish to smoke or to keep stag-beetles, and I shan’t see any of the chaps I was friends with again (and some of them were jolly decent, in spite of what you say about smoking) except Bags. It’s . . . it’s like emigrating. Of course, it’s perfectly ripping going to Marchester, but . . . oh, well, I feel rotten this afternoon.”
“Oh, is Bags going to Marchester?” asked Margery.
“Yes. I heard from him this morning. He’s going to Adams’s too.”
David’s tone was not that of one who finds a consoling circumstance, and Margery felt her way.
“But you’re tremendous friends with him, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, I suppose so. He was jolly decent to me last half when a lot of the fellows were against me. But he doesn’t play games, you know, and has got a weak heart, and he’s rather an ass in some ways . . . and he says he has persuaded his governor to let him go to Marchester, just because of me.”
“Well then, he’s very fond of you,” said Margery.
“I know he is. That makes me feel rather a cad. Of course it’ll be awfully nice to have Bags there and all that, but . . . oh, I can’t explain, and you can’t understand.”
But Margery, being a child herself, could completely understand the unfathomable mind of childhood.
“I shouldn’t worry about that, David,” she said. “Even if Bags can’t play cricket, perhaps you’ll find he can do something else that’ll make him all right.”
David regarded the roof of mulberry-leaves severely.
“Well, I suppose I’ve just got the hump,” he said. “I don’t care for the old things, and I haven’t got any new ones yet. Look at these holidays! I hate cathedrals, and we’re going to stop here all August. I don’t want to grub in the attics any more, or to play pirates, and there’s no cricket except one match against those rotten little choirboys. And father talks the most awful tosh about cricket. Says he never wore pads when he was a boy—I dare say they weren’t invented—and, anyhow, he could never have played for nuts. I can’t argue with him; it isn’t any use, because he doesn’t know!”
David sat up in a despair of indignation.
“Only the other day,” he said, “at the county match, he asked me where Jessop was fielding. So of course I said, ‘At cover-point,’ which he was. And father said, ‘Perhaps.’ It wasn’t ‘perhaps’; it was cover-point. There wasn’t a ‘perhaps’ in the whole blooming show. Why, even you know that! That makes it so unfair. If father tells me that dog-tooth ornament comes in Norman architecture I don’t say ‘Perhaps.’ ”
The wise Margery continued her course of consolation.
“Oh, but David,” she said. “There are a lot of things you like besides cricket. There’s that ripping poem you read me the other day, Keats’s ‘Ode to the Nightingale.’ I loved it. Was he head master of Eton?”
David wiped the final remains of the burst mulberry from his face in a magisterial manner.
“Head master of Eton!” he said. “Why, he was in a sort of doctor’s shop, where you might have got something for stomach-ache, the Head said. And all the time he was writing that ode. Isn’t it rummy?”
The boy is father to the man, so also is the girl to the woman. Margery, with secret glee, saw that David was feeling better, and inclined to be interested.
“Yes, you did tell me,” she said penitently; “but I forgot. Sorry, David.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I forget lots of things. I say, it’s an awful pity you’re a girl, Margery. You would have been such a ripping boy.”
“I dare say I should have got on all right,” said she. “Or perhaps you might have been a girl.”
“Me a girl?” said David. “But I couldn’t. Think of the things girls have to do. It’s ridiculous.”
Margery felt she must stand up for her sex.
“I don’t see that the things we have to do are more ridiculous than your smoking, or keeping those beastly stag-beetles,” said she, for she shared Bags’s horror of that which crawled.
David got up with extraordinary dignity.
“Those are the things I told you in confidence,” he said.
“Well, and whom have I told?” demanded Margery.
“Besides, they’re all finished,” said David. “You shouldn’t bring them up against me.”
“I didn’t; I was only arguing.”
“Then let’s stop arguing,” said David. “Lord, it’s only just three. There’s that beastly cathedral clock striking. I suppose that’s Norman, too, isn’t it? What are we to do?”
Margery made a little sympathetic grimace at David.
“Oh, David, I do understand,” she said, “and I’m so sorry you’re bored. I know exactly what’s the matter with you.”
“Wish you’d tell me,” said David.
“You know, too, really. You’ve dropped one lot of things and haven’t got the next lot yet. Then there’s this. Do you remember that green snake you used to keep, and how, when it was changing its skin, it used to lie quite still, not eating or drinking, and seeming awfully depressed? I expect that sort of thing is happening to you. I shouldn’t a bit wonder if our minds changed their skins now and then, just like snakes.”
David was interested in this, but it was necessary, in his present humour, to be rather depreciatory.
“Girls do have such rum notions,” he said. “I can’t think where you get them from. But what then?”
“Just that. You have been a little boy up till now, although you were no end of a swell at Helmsworth, and you’re just beginning to see it. You know you would have been furious with me if I had told you, even only last holidays, that you were only a little boy. But you don’t mind now because you know it yourself. You’re changing your skin. What—oh, I forget that word of yours, the Marchester one.”
“Piffle?” suggested David.
“Yes. What piffle you would have thought the Keats Ode only a few months ago, and at that time you thought it grand and grown-up to smoke.”
David sat down again, thoroughly interested in his own metamorphosis.
“Yes, that’s rum,” he said.
“No, not really. It’s just growing up.”
“It
