remembered against him, and it was confidently said that this
brilliance, with a man of Dune's temperament, could not possibly last.
But, nevertheless, the expectation of his success brought him up, with
precipitation, against the personality of Cardillac, and it was this
implied rivalry that agitated the College. It is only in one's second
year that a matter of this kind can assume world-shaking importance.
The First-year Undergraduate is too near the child, the Third-year
Undergraduate too near the man. For the First-year man School, for the
Third-year man the World looms too heavily. So it is from the men of
the Second year that the leaders are to be selected, and at this time in
Saul's Cardillac seemed to have no rival. He combined, to an admirable
degree, the man of the world and the sportsman; he had an air that was
beyond rubies. He was elegant without being effeminate, arrogant without
being conceited, indifferent without being blase. He had learnt, at
Eton, and at the knee of a rich and charming mother, that to be crude
was the unforgivable sin. He worshipped the god of good manners and
would have made an admirable son of the great Lord Chesterfield. Finally
he was the only man in Saul's who had any "air" at all, and he had
already travelled round the world and been introduced by his mother to
Royalty at Marienbad.

The only man who could ever have claimed any possible rivalry was Dune,
and Dune had seemed determined, until now, to avoid any-thing of
the kind. Suddenly the situation leapt upon the startled eyes of the
attentive world. Possibility of excitement. . . .

2

Olva, himself, was entirely unconcerned by this threatened rivalry. He
was being driven, by impulses that he understood only too well, into the
noisiest life that he could manage to find about him. The more noise the
better; he had only a cold fear at his heart that, after all, it would
penetrate his dreaded loneliness too little, let it be as loud a noise
as he could possibly summon.

He had not now--and this was the more terrible--any consciousness of
Carfax at all; there was waiting for him, lurking, beast-like, until its
inevitable moment, something far more terrible.

Meanwhile he made encounters. . . . There was Bunning. The Historical
Society in Saul's was held together by the Senior Tutor. This gentleman,
a Mr. Gregg, was thin, cadaverous, blue-chinned, mildly insincere. It
was his view of University life that undergraduates we