Though it required months for Tommy to understand them, he always knew they were good boys. Sometimes it rather frightened him when he realized he might never have known it, if he had not been an assistant to Duncan Ross at the Harbor Club, where there were other boys like them, to whom life seemed entirely amusing. They were emerging from a tobacco shop, when he saw them first, five or six of them in winter coats, bowing beneath the dejection of early morning. Tommy looked at them as he might at foreigners, and they did not look at him at all. First there came a tall boy with very black hair and a placid languid face and deep blue half circles beneath his eyes. “I don’t know why,” he was saying. “My head doesn’t seem to stand the strain as it did when I was younger. Sherwood, just as a friend, a schoolboy friend, will you please stop blowing in my face?” The name made Tommy stop, and there, sure enough, was Sherwood Jellett, shorter, with sandy hair. A glow of friendliness made Tommy smile.
