mildly drunk from Trinity Clareter or Phoenix Wine, he was always ready
to serve as a courteous listener of his rambling account of an evening's
adventures. He was borrowed by other digs to annoy the landladies: he
went for drives in motor cars to puzzle country inns. Lonsdale tried to
make him into a college mascot, and he drove in state to the St. Mary's
grind on the box seat of the coach. He was put down on the pavement
outside the lodge with a plate for pennies and a label "Blind" round his
neck. But Sammy's end was a sad one. He had been sent to call on the
Warden, and was last seen leaning in a despondent attitude against the
Warden's gothic door. Whether the butler broke him up when Sammy fell
forward onto his toes, or whether he was imprisoned eternally in a coal
cellar, no one knew. Lord Cleveden was informed he had been stolen.

If Michael had tried hard to find two people in whose company it would
be more difficult to work than with any other pair in the university, he
could scarcely have chosen better than Lonsdale and Grainger. Neither of
them was reading an Honor School, and the groups called H2 or C3 or X26,
that with each term's climax they were compelled to pass in order to
acquire the degree of bachelor of arts, produced about a week before
their ordeal a state of irritable industry, but otherwise were unheeded.
Michael was not sorry to let his own reading beyond the irreducible
minimum slide during this gay third year. He promised himself a fourth
year, when he would withdraw from this side of Oxford life and in some
cloistered digs work really hard. Meanwhile, he enjoyed 202 High as the
quintessence of youth's amenity.

Some of the most enduring impressions of Oxford were made now, though
they were not perhaps impressions that marked any development in himself
by intellectual achievements or spiritual crises. In fact, at the time
the impressions seemed fleeting enough; and it was only when the third
year was over, when Two Hundred and Two was dismantled of every vestige
of this transient occupation that Michael in summoning these impressions
from the past recaptured, often from merely pictorial recollections, as
much of Oxford as was necessary to tell him how much Oxford had meant.

There were misty twilights in November when Lonsdale came back spattered
with mud after a day with the Bicester or the V.W.H. At such an hour
Michael, who had probably been sitting alone by the roaring fire, was
always r