ty had to demonstrate its goodness.

Michael sometimes had misgivings about this narrowly selected paucity of
Good Eggs. He never doubted that those chosen were deservedly chosen,
but he did sometimes speculate whether in the masses of the Bad Men
there might not be a few Good Eggs unrecognized as Eggs, unhonored for
their Goodness. Yet whenever he made an excursion into the midst of the
Bad Men, he was always bound to admit the refreshment of his very firm
prejudice in favor of the Good Eggs. What was so astonishing about Good
Eggery was the members' obvious equipment for citizenship of the world
as opposed to the provincialism of Bad Mannery. Unquestionably it was
possible to meet the most intelligent, the most widely read Bad Men; but
intellect and culture were swamped by their barbarous self-proclamation.
They suffered from an even bitterer snobbishness than the Good Eggs. In
the latter case, the snobbishness was largely an inherited pride: with
the Bad Men it was obviously an acquired vanity. Where, however, Michael
found himself at odds with Good Eggery was in the admission to titular
respect of the Christ Church blood. This growing toleration was being
conspicuously exemplified in the attitude of St. Mary's, that most
securely woven and most intimate nest of Good Eggery.

When Michael had first come up there had been an inclination at his
college to regard with as much contemptuous indifference an election to
the Bullingdon as an election to the Union. It was tacitly understood at
St. Mary's that nothing was necessary to enhance the glory of being a
St. Mary's man. Gradually, however, the preponderance of Etonian
influence outweighed the conventional self-sufficiency of the
Wykehamists, and several men in Michael's year joined the Bullingdon,
one of the earliest of these destroyers of tradition being Lonsdale. The
result of this action was very definitely a disproportion in the
individual expenditure of members of the college. St. Mary's had always
been a college for relatively rich men, but in accordance with the
spirit of the college to form itself into an aristocratic republic, it
had for long been considered bad form to spend more than was enough to
sustain each member of this republic on an equality with his fellows.

Now Lonsdale was so obviously a Good Egg that it did not matter when he
played with equal zest roulette and polo or hunted three times a week or
wore clothes of the last extreme of fashion. Bu