“I’m not sure you’re fair to him.”

Rowsley turned up to his brother an amused, rather sweet smile.  “Val, you’d pray for the devil?”

“Oh, Hyde isn’t a devil!  I came pretty close to him ten years ago.  He has a streak of generosity in him:  no one knows that better than I do, for I’m in his debt.  What?  Oh! no, not in money matters:  is that likely?  But he’s capable of . . . magnanimity, one might call it,” Stafford fastidiously felt after precision:  “no, he wouldn’t pursue Laura; he wouldn’t make her life harder than it is already.”

“He might propose to make it easier.”  Rowsley threw a daisy at a cockchafer and missed it.  “You and I are sons of a parsonage.  We shouldn’t run off with a married lady because it would be against our principles.”  His thin brown features were twisted into a faint grimace.  Rowsley, like Val, possessed a satirical sense of humour, and gave it freer play than Val did.  “It’s so difficult to shake off early prejudices.  When Fowler and I were at the club the other day, we met a horrid little sweep who waxed confidential.  I said I couldn’t make love to a married woman if I tried, and Fowler said he could but held rather not, and we walked off, but as I remarked to Fowler afterwards the funny thing was that it was true.  I don’t see anything romantic in the situation.  It strikes me as immoral and disgusting.  But Hyde wouldn’t take a narrow view like mine.  He has to live up to his tailor.”

“Oh, really, Rose!” Val gave his unwilling laugh.  “You’re like Isabel, who can’t forgive him for sporting a diamond monogram.”

“No, but I’m interested.  I know Jack’s limitations, and Jimmy’s, and yours, but Hyde’s I don’t know, and he intrigues me,” said Rowsley, lighting a cigarette with his agile brown fingers.  “Now I’ll tell you the way he really strikes me.  He’s not a bad sort:  I shouldn’t wonder if there were more decency in him than he’d care to get credit for.  But I should think,” he looked up at Val with his clear speculative hazel eyes, “that he’s never in his life taken a thrashing.  He’s always had pots of money and superb health.  I know nothing, of his private concerns, but at all events he isn’t married, and from what Jack says he’s sought safety in numbers.  No wife, no kids, no near relations—­that means none of the big wrenches.  No:  I don’t believe Hyde’s ever taken a licking in his life.”

“You sound as if you would like to administer one.”

“Only by way of a literary experiment,” said Rowsley with his mischievous grin.  He was of the new Army, Val of the old:  it was a constant source of mild surprise to Val that his brother read books about philosophy, and psychology, and sociology, of which pre-war Sandhurst had never heard:  read poetry too, not Tennyson or Shakespeare, but slim modern volumes with brown covers and wide margins:  and wrote verses now and then, and sent them to orange-coloured magazines or annual anthologies, at which Val gazed from a respectful distance.  “I don’t owe him any grudge.  I’m not Bernard’s dry-nurse!”