'I never heard of more than one family of Plantagenets in England.'
'Eton, _of_ course?' Gillingham suggested with a languid look. 'It must Le Eton. It was founded by an ancestor.'
To Dick himself the question of the Plantagenet pedigree was too sacred for a jest; but he saw the only way to treat the matter in the present company was by joking; so he answered with a little laugh:
'I believe there's no provision there for the founder's kin, so I didn't benefit by it. I come only from a very small country grammar school--Chiddingwick, in Surrey.'
'Chiddingwick! Chiddingwick! Never knew there was such a place,' Gillingham put in with crushing emphasis. And he said it with an air which showed at once so insignificant a school was wholly unworthy a Born Poet's attention.
'Well, which are you going in for?' he asked, with a careless swing of his cane: 'The science, or the classics?'
'Neither,' Dick answered. 'My line's modern history.'
With a sudden little start, Gillingham seemed to wake up to interest. 'So's mine,' he put in, looking extremely wise. 'It's the one subject now taught at our existing Universities that a creature with a soul--immortal or otherwise--would be justified in bothering his head about for one moment. Classics and 'mathematics! oh, fiddlesticks! shade of Shelley, my gorge rises at them!'
'You won't have any chance against Gillingham, though, Faussett interposed with profound conviction. 'He's a fearful dab at history! You never knew such a howler. He's read pretty well everything that's ever been written in it from the earliest ages to the present time. Herodotus and York Powell alike at his finger-ends! We consider at Rugby that a man's got to get up uncommon early if he wants to take a rise out of Trevor Gillingham.'
'I'm sorry for that,' Dick answered quite earnestly, astonished, now he stood face to face with these men of the world, at his own presumption in venturing even to try his luck against them. 'For I can't have many shots at Scholarships myself; and, unless I get one, I can't afford to come up at all to the University.'
His very pride made him confess this much to his new friends at once, for he didn't wish to seem as if he made their acquaintance under false pretences.