is the worst in Oxford.

King's men were essentially Public School men. Few rich young men from
Eton came to a foundation which was neither particularly notable nor
particularly notorious. Wealth is not scrupulous as to which of those
types it favours, but it abhors the mean. Nor did the Grammar Schools
or the colonies supply more than a tithe of the college, which drew
mainly upon the middle rank of Public Schools. Herein lay both its
strength and its weakness. Its strength lay in its freedom from cranks
and bores, its weakness lay in its uniformity: a house which is not
divided in itself may stand firm, but it is likely to be a dull and
gloomy mansion.

Martin would have preferred to go to Balliol or New College, but as he
was paid eighty pounds a year to go to King's there was no profit in
grumbling. And so he set to work to find company, in which respect he
was indeed fortunate. While many of the freshers turned out to be good
men and dull, some even bad men and dull, the scholars were all
interesting. The uniformity of Public School tone naturally drove the
more critical together, and in Martin's year the house was saved from
gloom by at least a partial cleavage. Necessity aided inclination in
forming the Push.

The Push consisted of five men and contained a governing trinity.
These were Martin, Lawrence and Rendell. Rendell, the first classical
scholar, was attached to what the others called the ineffable
effs--Fabianism, Feminism and Faith. His god was paradoxical, but not
so exciting as Mr Chesterton's, and more interested in Social Reform
and Municipal Trading than in beer and ballads.

Rendell managed to entertain his various faiths without becoming a prig
or a Puritan. During his first months of emancipation from school he
had shown a suspicious hankering after beans and djibba-clad women, but
Martin and Lawrence suppressed such tendencies with a firm hand.
Rendell, though not pliable on the subject of religion, yielded on this
point and soon declared his complete contempt for the eating of
vegetables and drinking of ginger ale.

Lawrence was primarily noticeable for size. He was six foot three and
broad in proportion: he had a ruddy and cheerful countenance and
prodigious hands and feet. Essentially he believed in violence. He
didn't care twopence, he declared, for Fabianism or Construction
Policies and professed an intense desire to smash things, especially
religion and the social syst