n Rome 69

BOOK II: THE TANGLED SKEIN

I Quantum Mutatus 79

II Healthy Philistinism 102

III Tin Gods 119

IV Through a Glass Darkly 130

BOOK III: UNRAVELLING THE THREADS

I Common Room Faces 134

II Carnival 169

III Broadening Outlook 179

IV Thirds 185

V Dual Personality 196

VI The Games Committee 200

VII Rebellion 208

VIII The Dawning of many Dreams 213

BOOK IV: THE WEAVING

I The Twilight of the Gods 226

II Setting Stars 239

III Romance 242

IV The Dawn of Nothing 249

V The Things that Seem 259

VI The Tapestry Completed 277

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION

Books have their fates and this one's has been curious. I wrote it
between January and March 1916, when I was seventeen and a half years
old and in camp at Berkhamsted with the Inns of Court O.T.C. I loathed
it there, everything about it, the impersonal military machine, the
monotonous routine of drills and musketry, the endless foot-slogging,
the perpetual petty fault-finding. I kept comparing my present life with
that which I had been leading ten, eighteen, thirty months ago at
Sherborne, as a schoolboy.

My four years there had been very happy. I was the kind of a boy who
gets the most out of a public school. I loved cricket and football and
was reasonably good at them. I was in the first XV and my last summer
headed the batting averages. My father had lit in me a love of poetry
and an interest in history and the classics. More often than not I went
into a class-room looking forward to the hour that lay ahead. I enjoyed
the whole competitive drama of school life--the cups and caps and form
promotions. As I marched as a cadet over Ashridge Park I remembered that
a year ago I had been bicycling down to the football field for a punt
about on Upper. As I listened to a lecture on the establishment of an
infantry brigade, I thought of the sixth form sitting under that fine
scholar and Wordsworthian Nowell Smith to a discussion of Victorian
poetry. In the evenings on my way to night operations, passing
Berkhamsted School and looking at the lighted windows, I would think,
"At Sherborne now they are sitting round the games study fire waiting
for the bell to ring