You get disapproved of by all the
stupid and ordinary people who don't know you. Your father will be
in an awful state of mind. It's an experiment, I suppose? I imagine
you thought you would like to see how it felt to be drunk? Well,
living at close quarters like this, that sort of thing can't be
done. And then you were rude to Gretton. What's the point of that?
He is a very good fellow, minds his own business, doesn't
interfere, and keeps things very straight here. That part of it
seems to me simply ungentlemanly. And in any case, you have no
business to hurt the people who care for you, even if you think
they ought not to be distressed. I don't say it is immoral, but I
say it is a low business from beginning to end."
Jack, who bore signs of his overnight experience, gave Howard a
smile. "That's all right!" he said. "I don't object to that! You
have rather taken the wind out of my sails. If you had said I was a
sensual brute, I should have just laughed. It is such NONSENSE the
way these men go on! Why I was lunching with Gretton the other day,
and Corry told a story about Wordsworth as an undergraduate getting
drunk in Milton's rooms at Christ's, and how proud the old man was
of it to the end of his life. Gretton laughed, and thought it a
joke; and then when one gets roaring drunk, they turn up their eyes
and say it is unmanly and so on. Why can't they stick to one line?
If you go to bump-suppers and dinners, and just manage to carry
your liquor, they think you a good sort of fellow, with no sort of
nonsense about you--'a little natural boyish excitement'--you know
the sort of rot.
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