Ordinary pursuits had lost their charms. They neither ran nor leapt nor played Red Indians nor ranged the countryside nor carried on guerrilla warfare with the neighbouring farmers. Instead they held meetings in each other’s back gardens, in each other’s shrubberies and summer-houses and tool sheds, eloquently discoursing on the gravity of the situation, but finding no remedy for it. The cause of the whole trouble was the fatal attractiveness of William’s sister Ethel. Not that William or any of his friends actually admitted the fatal attractiveness. Ethel was to them an ordinary disagreeable ‘grown up’ with a haughty manner and impossible standards of cleanliness, who happened also to possess a combination of red hair and blue eyes that had a strange and unaccountable effect upon adult members of the opposite sex. They cherished always a stern and bitter contempt for Ethel’s admirers. And now Douglas’s brother George and Ginger’s brother Hector had joined the number.
