“Gosh, what a brick!” said David to himself, as he went out. . . .
David was lying on his back under the big elm-tree near the cricket pavilion one Sunday afternoon in mid-June. By him, upright and attentive, sat the faithful Bags, listening and occasionally playing the part of Greek chorus (that is to say, putting in short, appropriate reflections) to a quantity of surprising information. Both boys wore the white tie characteristic of prefects on Sunday, for both had got their promotion into the lower sixth at Easter, and were colleagues of the inefficient Manton and Crossley. Those two young gentlemen, it may be remarked, were vastly relieved to have the burden of authority taken off their somewhat feeble shoulders, and David and Bags (particularly David) ruled the house with genial exuberance, and, when necessary, a rod of iron.
Just now both the iron and the exuberance were relaxed, and David lay there in an abandonment of physical laziness. His straw hat, with cricket eleven colours, was tilted over the top part of his face, so as to shield his eyes from the speckles and sparkles of sun that filtered through the canopy of leaves above him, and his mouth and chin alone were visible. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, showing a white hiatus between a despondent sock and the end of his trousers, and a persistent fly kept settling there, an attention which he acknowledged by dabbing at it with the other ankle.
“’Tisn’t as if I was a little boy any longer,” he said. “When a fellow is close on seventeen, as you and I are, it’s time he began to realise that he’s grown up. Why, my mother was only seventeen when she married.”
“But do you propose to marry at seventeen?” asked Bags with sarcastic allusion to the conversation that had gone before. “Where’ll she live? She can’t very well sleep in dormitory.”
David gave a little spurt of laughter, and the sun shone on his white teeth, and down his red throat. But he quickly became grave again.
“Is that funny?” he said. “If so, I suppose I’d better laugh, though I wish I saw the point. Who said I was going to marry? O gosh, what a clipper she is!”
“And it’s not much more than a fortnight ago that you thought all girls were rotten,” said Bags.