That was the first big moment of Morton's life, and with the
determination characteristic of him he set out to accomplish what he had
decided. In England we make our future through our friends, in this
country you make it through your enemies. But it wasn't easy for Morton;
such tasks never are. He had a good many insults to swallow. In the end,
however, from being tolerated he came to be indispensable, and from
being indispensable eventually to be liked. He had planned his campaign
with care. Carefulness, recklessly carried out, has been, I think, the
guiding rule of his life. He had modelled himself on Bewsher; he walked
like Bewsher; tried to think like Bewsher--that is, in the less
important things of life--and, with the divination that marks his type
of man, the little money he had, the little money that as a schoolboy he
could borrow, he had spent with precision on clothes and other things
that brought him personal distinction; in what people call necessities
he starved himself. By the time he was ready to leave school you could
hardly have told him from the man he had set out to follow: he was
equally well-mannered; equally at his ease; if anything, more conscious
of prerogative than Bewsher. He had come to spend most of his holidays
at Bewsher's great old house in Gloucestershire. That, too, was an
illumination. It showed him what money was made for--the sunny quiet of
the place, the wheels of a spacious living that ran so smoothly, the
long gardens, the inevitableness of it all. Some day, he told himself,
he would have just such a house. He has. It is his mistress. The world
has not allowed him much of the poetry that, as you must already see,
the man has in him; he takes it out on his place.

"It was in Morton's last year at Oxford, just before his graduation,
that the second great moment of his life occurred. He had done well at
his college, not a poor college either; and all the while, you must
remember, he was borrowing money and running up bills. But this didn't
bother him. He was perfectly assured in his own mind concerning his
future. He had counted costs. In that May, Bewsher, who from school had
gone to Sandhurst, came up on a visit with two or three other fledgling
officers, and they had a dinner in Morton's rooms. It turned into rather
a 'rag,' as those things do, and it was there, across a flower-strewn,
wine-stained table, that Morton had his second revelation. He wasn't
drunk--he never got drunk;