d with a passion for 'running things'
indiscriminately and irresponsibly, he quite realised that bossing has
its pleasures and possibilities. It was typical of the new situation
that he was able to give up playing forward for the house and to obtain
a trial as wing three-quarter. He had pace and managed to score in the
first game: soon he improved wonderfully and settled down in his
position. It struck him that there was a great deal to be said for
playing football, even regular, incessant football, when you could
choose your own position in the field and play without fear of being
sworn at.

Naturally his duties brought him into closer contact with his
housemaster and he became intimate with the methodical ways of Mr
Berney and the efficient management and culture of his wife. In the
evenings he received frequent invitations to the drawing-room, where he
would talk about Florence and Botticelli, Oxford and Matthew Arnold.
In his younger days he had worshipped Mrs Berney with a flaming
devotion. Now he was more critical, but, while he understood the
limitations of her culture and suspected her of attending University
Extension Lectures in order to be told about the poets, he did not
cease to like her. At any rate she did not bubble over with
unconvincing enthusiasm, like Mrs Foskett, and she did care in a rather
ignorant, muddle-headed, but thoroughly genuine way for the things of
art. Martin had of course outdistanced many of her tastes and they
would have great arguments about Tennyson and Browning and Swinburne.
Mrs Berney, who was deeply religious, could never forgive Swinburne.
It seemed strange to Martin that so persistent and so sincere an
affection for poetry should be so limited. What did it matter, he
asked himself, whether Swinburne liked God or whether he didn't? The
point was to him that Swinburne had a great, angry soul and could let
himself go. But Mrs Berney insisted that that had nothing to do with
it: poetry was the making of a beautiful thing and Swinburne had tried
to make ugly things beautiful. Of course Martin urged that poetry
consisted in pouring a true thing out of yourself, and then he shocked
her by saying he hated the word "beautiful." And so they would be
carried away with long arguments on aesthetics, sometimes childish and
always futile, for neither realised when they had reached an ultimate
or what exactly they were trying to prove. Yet both enjoyed the
conversation: Martin