prefects in gowns and white ties; two hundred shivering and
draggled young men and girls, pressing together for warmth in the five
o'clock chill of a June morning outside the Town Hall of Oxford. There
were two shelves of calf-bound, marbled prize books between the windows,
a pair of limp, battered racquets over the mantel-piece and a fumed-oak
shield with the university and college arms contiguously inclined like
the hearts of two lovers.

Eric shed his coat and waist-coat on the bed, lighted a pipe and prowled
ruminatively round the room. Somewhere in the shivering ball-group Jack
Waring was to be found, marked out by the blue dress-coat of the
Bullingdon. Philpot of B.N.C., Trevor of the House, Loring of the House,
Crabtree of Magdalen, Flint of Exeter--Eric turned from one blue-coated
sign-post to another until he identified Waring with a crumpled shirt
front and disordered hair, cross-legged in the front row. It was a
smiling, vacuous, uncharacteristic photograph, and he abandoned it for a
bulky album stamped with his initials.

He retreated to the bed and sprawled over a group of the "Mystics." This
was a detached and scornful club, exasperating to outsiders, tiresome to
its members; Waring and he had joined it at the same time and taken
possession of it; their vague home intimacy had ripened into an
interested friendship as they strolled back to college from the weekly
meetings, once more refighting the frigidly abstract battles in which
they had lately engaged from the depths of arm-chairs with their feet on
the table and piled dessert-plates in their laps. Without effort or
desire Waring had set a fashion and founded a school of icy
fastidiousness. Within the limits of college discipline, which he
scrupulously observed, Waring dissociated himself from the life and
conventions of the college, the abbreviations and colloquialisms of
Oxford speech, the slovenly mode of dress and juvenility of mind. His
serenity floated as smoothly over the collective ideas and standards of
his fellows as over intercollegiate jealousies; and, as he left the
college distantly alone, the college sought him out, elected him to
clubs which he seldom attended and to banquets which he overlaid with
baffling and frigid aloofness.

When Waring went to the bar, he shared chambers with Eric for four years
in Pump Court; and, though they met at most for an hour each day, there
resulted an intimacy which neither could replace when Waring mov