“Oh, Lord!” groaned the doctor.

“I think I’m a Socialist,” suddenly put in Doe, and Chappy turned to him, dumbfounded to witness the eruption of a second youth.  “I’ve long thought that, when I find my feet in politics, I shall be in the Socialist camp.  They may be visionary, but they are idealists.  And I think it’s up to us public-schoolboys to lead the great mass of uneducated people, who can’t articulate their needs.  I’d love to be their leader.”

“What you’re going to be,” said Radley, “is an intellectual rebel.  When you go up to Oxford in a year or so, you’ll pose as most painfully intellectual.  You’ll be a Socialist in Politics, a Futurist in Art, and a Modernist or Ultramontane in Religion—­anything that’s a rebellion against the established order.  At all costs let us be original and outrageous.”

“Hear, hear,” whispered Penny.

“Ray has been the strong, silent man so far,” said Radley.  “Let’s hear his Castle in the Air.”

“For God’s sake—­” began Chappy.

“Speech!  Speech!” demanded Pennybet.

“Oh, I don’t know,” demurred I.  “I’ve not many ideas.  I generally think I’d like to be a country squire, very popular among the tenants, who’d have my photo on their dressers.  And I’d send them all hares and pheasants at Christmas and be interested in their drains—­”

I was elaborating this picture, when Penny, feeling that he had made his speech and was not particularly interested in anyone else’s, glanced at a gold wrist-watch, and decided that it was time for him to go.  He made a peculiarly effective exit, his hat tilted at what he called a “damn-your-eyes” angle.  Never again did Doe or I see him, though we heard of his doings.  God speed to him, our cocksure Pennybet.  Let us always think the best of him.

No sooner had the door clicked than Chappy exploded.

“That high youth ought to have his trousers taken down and be birched.  What are we coming to, when boys like him lecture their elders on how to run the world?”

“That question,” Radley retorted, “Adam probably asked Eve, when Cain and Abel decided to be Socialists.”

“I tell you, these self-opinionated boys want whipping, and so do you, Master Doe, with your damned Fabianism.”

“Oh, come, come,” objected Radley.  “I like them to be gloriously self-confident.  Young blood is heady stuff.  And there’d be something wrong, if a body full of young blood didn’t have a head full of glittering illusions.”

“Rot!” proclaimed Chappy.

“I like them to be Socialists and Futurists and everything.  If they don’t want to put the world to rights, who will?”

“Damned rot!”

“It’s nothing of the sort,” rejoined Radley, getting annoyed.  “They ought to break out at this time.  You can’t bind up a bud to prevent it bursting into flower.”

“If I’d children who burst like that, I’d bind them for you!”