"He's hardly spoken to either of us," Chips was saying to himself, "since the very beginning of our first term; and I should like to have seen him now, if the Tiger hadn't finished fourth in the Mile!"
The worst of the enthusiastic temperament is that it lends itself to cynicism almost as readily, and vice versa as in Jan's case now. Jan also had felt often very bitter about Evan, if not exactly against him, yet here he was basking in the boy's first tardy and almost mercenary smile. But Jan's case was peculiar, as we know; and everything nice had come together, filling his empty cup to overflowing. He might despise public-school traditions as much as he pretended for Chips's benefit, but he was too honest to effect indifference to his little succès d'estime of the day before. He knew it was not little for his age. He would have confessed it some consolation for being at school against his will—but it was not against his will that he was walking with Master Evan on equal terms this fine spring morning. He had always seen that the making or the marring of his school life lay in Evan's power. It had not been marred as it might have been by a cruel or a thoughtless tongue; it might still be made by kind words and even an occasional show of equality by one whom Jan never treated as an equal in his thoughts. He was nervous as they trod the hilly roads, but he was intensely happy. Spring was in the bold blue sky, and in the hedgerows faintly sprayed with green—less faintly if you looked at them aslant—and in Jan's heart too. Spring birds were singing, and Evan bubbling like a brook with laughter and talk of home and the holidays that Jan knew all about; yet never a word to let poor Chips into the secret of their old relations, or even to set him wondering. Any indiscretion of that sort was by way of falling from Jan himself.
