‘If a man does something in a decent game like rugger,’ he said coldly and distinctly, ‘it’s a sign that he’s a good bloke. If the people watching start clapping, that’s their way of saying to him, “We appreciate that. You’re a good bloke.” It takes a good bloke to play well at a decent game like rugger. If that’s what you call drawing attention to oneself, that’s not what I call it. I call it just being a good bloke.’

‘At a decent game like rugger,’ said Charles in a parody of Burge’s manner.

Burge took a step forward. Charles thought he was going to hit him, and almost threw up his fists. But Burge checked himself. There were females present, females of his own species.

‘I suppose people like you wouldn’t call rugger a decent game,’ he said, challenging Charles to say something really outrageous, to brand himself.

‘And there’s another thing,’ he said, raising his voice, when his challenge was received in silence. ‘Just what the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at, Lumley, eh? They tell me you’ve taken a job at the hospital as an orderly. Carrying buckets about and emptying bedpans. What the bloody hell’s the big idea?’

Charles was roused to a degree he would have believed impossible. His heart was pounding with rage, and he felt the blood surging behind his eyes.

‘Do I understand, Burge,’ he said, with a hint of a choke in his voice, ‘that you are interfering with my right, the absolute right of a citizen, to do just whatever work I may choose?’

Two people moved forward and began to speak in an attempt to stop this before it went any farther: the landlady who was more of a friend, and a tall girl with a bad complexion who was evidently connected with Burge in some way, probably his fiancée. But it was too late. Everyone was listening intently, and Burge was not to be halted.

‘Yes, you bloody well do understand it,’ he cried. ‘That sort of work ought to be done by people who are born to it. You had some sort of education, some sort of upbringing, though I must say you don’t bloody well behave like it. You ought to have taken on some decent job, the sort of thing you were brought up and educated to do, and leave this bloody slop-emptying to people who were brought up and educated for slop-emptying.’

There was a murmur among the company that indicated agree­ment. Burge had expressed one of the prime articles of all their faith.

‘You deny, then, that hospital orderly work is a valuable and necessary job?’