he preferred rather to play loosely with ideas and to
follow the literary and social questions arising from a study of the
ancient literatures than to apply himself vigorously to pure
scholarship. There never had been any doubt about his being an Oxford
man. His tastes and abilities, his family connections and his project
of entering the Civil Service all pointed in one direction. Moreover,
he had somehow been obsessed with a notion that all Cambridge colleges,
with the exception of King's and Trinity, were like public schools
continued. Had not Heseltine gone to Cambridge? But Oxford would be
very different; for how could Oxford, the home of Shelley and Swinburne
and Morris, be anything but beautiful and brilliant? Martin was
thrilled by the exquisite promise of life: Oxford would be heavenly,
and heaven--well, heaven would be all atheism and epigrams. The
paradox pleased him and he wondered whether it was the sort of remark
he would make to his college debating society next October. But first
of all, he sadly remembered, there was this affair of scholarships.

He entered for a small group and gave King's pride of place. It had
been his father's college and was in many ways suitable. Its
scholarships were neither too hard nor too easy to win. It was a small
college in the first rank and commanded universal respect. It prided
itself on being successful, not brazenly, like Balliol, but with
discretion, unassumingly.

In spite of the opinions of poets, literary gentlemen and writers of
guide-books, it is possible to maintain that Oxford is not a nice place
in which to live, much less to work. In December it is, on the whole,
at its worst, and it was on the second Monday of that month that Martin
arrived in the city. Term had ended on the previous Saturday, and only
a few undergraduates were to be seen wandering about the deserted
streets with a bored and lost expression. Oxford has a double
personality: in term it serves efficiently as a crowded pleasure
resort; in the vacation it is one of those cities, like Bruges la
morte, whose justification is in the past and the memorials of the
past. A compromise is fatal and undergraduates must exist in hundreds
or not at all. A soft drizzle fell from a yellow, smudgy sky and the
streets were covered with a particularly loathsome mud. As he drove
down from the station to King's (he was to have rooms in college),
Martin was horrified: he felt that he had never se