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low, just the chap to make a reluctant tractor go or tinker with an ailing oil-engine, one who might astonish you by the agility with which he would shin up on to a barn roof or vault a five-barred gate, but not a man you'd ever expect to contribute anything to such an argument as we had that evening after dinner.
Yet his mother was right. That argument more than anything else showed me the change in him. He was not a fox-hunter, but he liked fox-hunters and he loved all exercises of bodily strength and skill. In pre-war days he had always subscribed to the Saxby Hunt, in whose country Thorsway lay, and if he did not hunt with them it was because he had always been a runner rather than a rider. He had been a notable cross-country man at Cambridge; a very good all-round athlete, but no horseman. In his country setting I thought of him as the descendant of a line of yeomen rather than squires, one of that old race of Lincolnshire farmers whose delight was in greyhounds rather than foxhounds, who took their long-dogs coursing over the windy wolds on foot. But country sports were in his blood. Had Frank attacked fox-hunting in the old days as he did this evening Alan would have been the first to sail into action in defence of it.
But now he had kept silence for an hour and a half while the others went at it hammer and tongs: Frank Rowan, in truculent mood retrospectively fighting the lost battle of the anti-fox-hunting Bill only recently then defeated in the House of Commons, was witty, bitter, provocative and, to my mind, something less than polite to his hostess and her neighbours when he stressed the moral and intellectual insufficiency of those who practised or approved blood-sports. Major Hedley combined the modesty of a good professional soldier with a countryman's knowledge of hunting; he defended the cause on his own well-known ground and steadily refused to be lured into regions where Frank might take him at a disadvantage with his weapons of philosophy and psychology.
Not so Elizabeth H