om the conversation and sat silent, counting with cold
dislike the constellated pimples on Carben's face. Meanwhile the others
exercised their scornful wit upon the "bloods" of the college.

"Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?" Carben indignantly demanded.
"Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. 'Can't you keep
your fat little paunch down? I don't want to look at it,' said Fitzroy.
That's pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man in front
of a lot of freshers. Gingold's going to jack rowing, and he's quite
right."

"Quite right," a chorus echoed.

Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.; he
remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion of
wrath at the insult offered to Gingold's dignity irritated Michael. He
felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he thoroughly
deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was probably as
offensive as Jones and Carben.

"These rowing bloods think they've bought the college," somebody was
wisely propounding.

"We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn't we?" Michael
inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed
rebuke.

"Well, I think it would be a d'd good thing, if we dropped six places,"
Carben affirmed.

How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary,
and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose
atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with
a dismal genteelness.

"Oh, by the way, before you go," said Carben, "you'd better let me put
your name down for the Ugger."

"The what?" Michael asked, with a faint insolence.

"The Union."

Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of
committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the
sponsorship of Carben.

"I don't think I'll join this term."

He ran down the stairs from Carben's rooms and stood for a moment
apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St. Mary's
tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook off the
memory of Carben's tea-party as if he had alighted from a crowded Sunday
train and plunged immediately into deep country.

In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and
was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called
along the table to Grainger:

"I say, Tommy, do you know we've got