lt. But they seemed to take everything for granted.
That's what made me so wild."

"Look here, we can't start a conversation like this just before school.
Are you going home to dinner?" Alan asked.

"No, I'll have dinner down in the Tuck," said Michael, "and we can go
for a walk afterwards, if you like. It's the first really decent day
we've had this year."

So after a lunch of buns, cheese-cakes, fruit pastilles, and vanilla
biscuits, eaten in the noisy half-light of the Tuckshop, accompanied by
the usual storm of pellets, Michael and Alan set out to grapple with the
situation Michael had by his own hasty behaviour created.

"The chaps seem rather sick with you," observed Alan, as they strolled
arm-in-arm across the school-ground not yet populous with games.

"Well, they are such a set of sheep," Michael urged in justification of
himself.

"I thought you rather liked them."

"I did at first. I do still in a way. I do when nothing matters; but
that horrible line in the paper did matter most awfully, and I couldn't
stick their bleating. You see, you're different. You just say nothing.
That's all right. But these fools tried to say something and couldn't. I
always did hate people who _tried_ very obviously. That's why I like
you. You're so casual and you always seem to fit."

"I don't talk, because I know if I opened my mouth I should make an ass
of myself," said Alan.

"There you are, that's what I say. That's why it's possible to talk to
you. You see I'm a bit mad."

"Shut up, you ass," commanded Alan, smiling.

"Oh, not very mad. And I'm not complaining. But I _am_ a little bit mad.
I always have been."

"Why? You haven't got a clot on your brain, have you?"

"Oh, Great Scott, no! It's purely mental, my madness."

"Well, I think you're talking tosh," said Alan firmly. "If you go on
thinking you're mad, you will be mad, and then you'll be sorry. So shut
up trying to horrify me, because if you really were mad I should bar
you," he added coolly.

"All right," said Michael, a little subdued, as he always was, by Alan's
tranquil snubs. "All right. I'm not mad, but I'm excitable."

"Well, you shouldn't be," said Alan.

"I can't help my character, can I?" Michael demanded.

"You're not a girl," Alan pointed out.

"Men have very strong emotions often," Michael argued.

"They may have them, but they don't show them. Just lately you've been
holding forth about the rotten way in which everybody gets hyste