Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/378

 learn your place even in your own house when you get one."

That touch put Jan more at his ease.

"And you may have been in the Eleven two or three years," said he, "but you've got a new job to tackle when you're captain. They say there's room at the top, but there isn't room to sit down!"

"That was worth learning!" cried Heriot, eagerly. "I'm not sure it wasn't worth coming here to pick up that alone. And you'll manage your men all right, though I daresay they're not any easier out there than here. That's all to the good, Rutter."

"But suppose I hadn't been a left-hand bowler?"

Jan grinned; it had struck him as a poser.

"Well, you'd have come to the front in something else. You did, you know, in other things besides cricket. It's a case of character, and that was never wanting."

But if he had not been an athlete at all! That was the real poser. Heriot was glad it was not put to him. It would have been unanswerable in the case of perhaps half the athletes in the school. What would Goose have been?

"Then there's manners," said Jan, who could warm up to a discussion if he was given time. "But I doubt I'm no judge of them."

"They're the very worst criterion in the world, Jan. The only way to use your judgment, there, is not to judge anybody on earth by his manners."

That was not quite what Jan meant, but he felt vaguely comforted and Heriot breathed again. He was not a man who could say what he did not mean to people whom he did care about. He knew that Jan could still be uncouth, that it might tell against him here and there in life, and yet that what he meant was no more than flotsam on the