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So, then, all this sympathy and encouragement were not for the two boys at all, but for their Form. They might just as well have been two carefully trained racehorses starting on a race with heavy odds upon them. The Doctor's entry, however, put an end to any further talk, and, as usual, a dead silence ensued after the boys had taken their seats. The Doctor looked a little uneasy.
Behind the house, on a spare allotment, were two or three loose-boxes for racehorses, a saddle-room and a groom's room. This was the whole establishment. A woman came in every day to do up his rooms from the hotel, where he had his meals.
When we meet them first they are young girls fifteen and sixteen "rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, roguish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise" at an age when "if one is frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn: one has learnt simply everything in the previous six months."
By the United States she has been taught the scientific method of riding racehorses, and also of sailing yachts; she has been defeated in polo by a Transatlantic team; her selected representative horsemen are unsuccessful in the International Military Tournaments; she cannot defeat Australia on the cricket field; a Belgian crew holds its own at Henley.
In the course of conversation, the old man managed to unearth the fact that our acting foreman was a native of Tennessee, and when he had got it down to town and county, claimed acquaintanceship with a family of men in that locality who were famed as breeders of racehorses.
And later on she discovered that he had always supposed the "Faery Queen," and "Adonais," and "In Memoriam," names he had heard at intervals during his life, for he was fifty and such things do sometimes get mentioned were well-known racehorses.
We saw all the racehorses returning from their morning gallop, and were enlightened by the syces as to their names and respective owners. There were several people, a great deal of luggage, and, though last not least, Her Majesty's mails, all waiting, like us, for the coach.
Dale instantly became a lexicon of weird-sounding words, for the British turf is exceedingly democratic in its pronunciation of the classical and foreign names frequently given to racehorses. His stock of racing lore was eked out by reference to a local paper; still Simmonds scratched an uncertain pate. "Pity, too!" he said at last.
"P'raps it'll be a mansion, or a sheep station, or a stud of racehorses," meekly suggests a tired-looking South Australian, with a derisive twist of his under lip.
The marvellous journalists who frequent betting resorts printed hundreds of paragraphs every week explaining the wretched boy's extravagances how he lost ten thousand pounds in one evening at cards; how he lost five thousand on one pigeon-shooting match; how he kept fifty racehorses in training; how he made little presents of jewelry to all and sundry of his friends; how he gaily lost fifteen thousand on a single race, though he might have saved himself had he chosen; how he never would wear the same shirt twice.
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