be our companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once
known a girl whose hair was gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh
to convey the quality of her; just simply and with projectile violence:
"My God!"

Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be married
to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot now imagine
why. She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said. A sort of shame
came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton
committed himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon great
pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a
governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we
became alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For might
she not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sickly
pointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we
lived?

We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially this
same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the Cam.
We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we
flourished about in the Union and made our watchword, namely, "stark
fact." We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if they had been
flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my
long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, and found for it a
completer and less restrained companion, a companion I never cared for
in the slightest degree....

This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, our
more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and three of
us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had a
Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself
who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken the Mental and
Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a
lectureship in political science. In those days it was disguised in the
cloak of Political Economy.

2

It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream of
undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our
beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be
differentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter,
who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an appetite for
ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other hand
we intimat