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A tall individual, with legs much too thin for a rotund stomach, and with watery eyes, strolled up and remarked, "Just left her eh? Quick work." He wore a soiled suit of blue flannel with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a dingy gray moustache drooped from his lip, and daylight could be seen in two places between the rim and the crown of his hat.
Why was he not cricketing, or shooting, or exploring, or using the muscles Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose, instead of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other people's night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go away? 'Come, Mr. Denman, said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; 'the audience is about collected, I think.
I studied her in the light of a harmless sort of unaccountable creature; witness at any rate for the fact that I had escaped from school. We loitered half the morning round a cricketers' booth in a field, where there was moderately good cricketing. The people thought it of first- rate quality. I told them I knew a fellow who could bowl out either eleven in an hour and a half.
Her brother Jim who was a dawdling, good-natured-looking lad of about fifteen, clad in a marvellous costume of cricketing trousers, a "blazer" of overpowering blue and yellow stripes, and an Egyptian fez set far back on his forehead helped her to explore the contents of the cupboard; and very soon the three of them were seated at a comfortable and most welcome little banquet.
Men who are as yet little more than boys, who have but just left, what indeed we may not call a school, but a seminary intended for their tuition as scholars, whose thoughts have been mostly of boating, cricketing, and wine parties, ascend a rostrum high above the heads of the submissive crowd, not that they may read God's word to those below, but that they may preach their own word for the edification of their hearers.
While ambition made him work tolerably hard, as far as he could do so without attracting observation, the line he took was to disparage industry, and ally himself with the merely cricketing set, with some of whom he might be seen strolling arm-in-arm, in loud conversation, at every possible opportunity.
"William was," said Hannah, "a journeyman hatter, in B . He had walked over to see the cricketing, and then he came again. Her mother liked him. Everybody liked him and she had promised. Was it wrong?" "Oh, no! And where are you to live?" "William had got a room in B . He works for Mr. Smith, the rich hatter in the market-place, and Mr. Smith speaks of him, oh, so well!
Hullo! Who did that? What an awfully fine thing! For suddenly, behind the Squire's head, Chicksands had become aware of an easel, and on it a charcoal sketch, life-size, of a boy, who seemed about eighteen or nineteen, in cricketing dress. The Squire looked round. 'What, that sketch of Desmond? Haven't you seen it? Yes, it's jolly good. I got Orpen to do it in July.
And the next morning after breakfast he squared up all the cricketing accounts, went round to his tradesmen and other acquaintance, and said his hearty good-byes; and by twelve o'clock was in the train, and away for London, no longer a school-boy, and divided in his thoughts between hero-worship, honest regrets over the long stage of his life which was now slipping out of sight behind him, and hopes and resolves for the next stage upon which he was entering with all the confidence of a young traveller.
He then told me that there was a paragraph going round the papers, to the effect that I was 'in a critical state of health. I asked him if he was sure it wasn't 'cricketing' state of health? To which he replied, Quite. I then asked him down here to dinner, and he was again staggered by finding me in sporting training; also much amused.
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