And these images lost their outline, and became blurred with the approach of sleep.
One of the house-masters at Marchester was an old friend of the Archdeacon, and it had been arranged that David should stay with Mr. Adams when he went up for his scholarship examination. Hughes, David’s great chum of a year ago, was in Adams’s house, and by permission met him at the station, and, after the first greetings, looked David over with an eye made critical by the adamantine traditions that bind junior boys at public schools. Hughes was extremely glad to see him, but he had certainly been very anxious to get an early and private view of him to see if he came up to the standards and ordinances then prevailing, and make such corrections in his bearing and attire as were necessary. It would be an awful thing, for instance, if David turned up in a straw hat with his school eleven colours, as those were identical with the Rugby fifteen colours at Marchester, and to be seen walking about with a small alien boy in fifteen colours was a nightmare possibility. But there was a lot, as he saw at once, to be said in David’s favour: his clothes were neat, he looked exceedingly clean (not grubby, a thing which Hughes, from his faded reminiscences of Helmsworth, was dismally afraid of), his hair was short behind and well inside his collar, and he stood straight. On the other hand, there were certain details that must be altered.
“I say, have you been travelling in a smoker?” he asked. “Second, too.”
David wished he had spent his last shilling in going first.
“Yes, first was so frightfully expensive,” said David.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that: all the fellows go third. Yes, the bus will take your luggage up, and we’ll walk, shall we? It’ll take the fug of the smoking-carriage out of your clothes.”
David marvelled at this: he had thought a smoking-carriage must be the manly thing. He had a packet of cigarettes also in his coat-pocket.
“Don’t fellows smoke here?” he asked, looking up in timid admiration at Hughes, who had grown enormously.
“Oh yes, in some scuggy houses,” he said, “but not in Adams’s. It’s thought frightfully bad form in Adams’s!”
David fingered his packet of cigarettes nervously, conscious suddenly of the enormous gulf that yawned between a private and a public school, and yearning to bridge it over by every means in his power.