e for
the Home."

"I wish the deuce I had," sighed Martin. "If I'd worked all the time I
might have done it. But it's too late now. I don't really know
anything and will be lucky to get India. Come on, let's move a bit."

During the next few days Martin managed to forget the looming menace of
the East. The heat remained and they lived on the river, bathing and
sleeping and feeding in turn. And then here were a couple of farewell
dinners. The champagne flowed and Holywell was full of rushing people
and strange noises. The passing of Lawrence was worthy of his whole
career and on his last night a stalwart cortege bore him like a warrior
to his rest.

After the end of term Martin stayed up to work. July was a month of
lonely misery, of dust and bad tennis and the cramming of English
Literature. At last the time for his Greats viva came and he walked
down to the Schools with Lawrence, there to be asked by a nervous
little man whether he thought things or thought thoughts. He at once
informed the nervous little man that this was an idiotic question and
that Descartes ... his knowledge of Descartes was overwhelming.
Lawrence was dealt with by a truculent, red-faced man who asked him
minute questions about the wanderings of the Phocaeans. Lawrence just
smiled wisely and was sent away. Rendell's turn came later. He was
asked about the foundations of morality and maintained that while Kant
was very wise and venerable he was also very wrong. But he remained
respectful of Kant. One can only be offensive to J. S. Mill in Oxford
nowadays, but about him one can say anything.

Once more Rendell took a first, Martin a second, and Lawrence a third.
It was the history that kept them apart. Their philosophy had been
uniformly good; Mr Cuggy was filled with pride and wrote to
congratulate them all: whereat they wondered what would have happened
if they had continued to cling to that philosophic rock, the Absolute.
Yet it was nice of him to write. That was the worst of Cuggy: you
couldn't dislike him.

From an Oxford of glaring streets and searching, irresistible dust
Martin went up to London to seek his fortune at Burlington House.
Later he remembered that August as a month of blazing heat and tired
hands and aching head. He remembered a gloomy place shaped like a
theatre where morose men asked him if he had a buff book and tore his
papers from under his pen when time was up. There were days of solid
labour and n