ed
to me I was trying by a process of mental arithmetic to discover how
much money I had to my credit in the bank; the voice which I heard
seemed to me to belong to bygone ages, and I was so worried by actual
and present facts that I could not screw up a vestige of interest in
antiquities. I know that it was always my fate to arouse either the
irony or the anger of my tutor, for to other men he was far more
pleasant than he was to me, but I could not help thinking of him as
representative of a system which could never influence me in the least.
He soon discovered that I was paying no attention to him, and I suppose
that I must have got most vigorously on his nerves, for he really
became quite humanly angry, I must have been nearer to an understanding
with him at that moment than I had ever been. But when his rage
abated, his lips snapped and the thunderbolts ceased. He went on too
long and became sarcastic again, as if ashamed of being properly angry,
and I left him with the usual hopeless feeling that we should never
understand each other.

I went into the common room as I was crossing the quad, and before I
had been there two minutes Dennison came in with Lambert and two or
three other men of their set. No one else was in the room except
Murray, who was reading, and absolutely refused to talk to me about
Edwardes, so I turned over various papers until Dennison asked me if I
did not think our eight was quite the most comically bad boat I had
ever seen.

"The whole college is going to the deuce," I answered.

"You look as if you were up late last night, and have got a fair old
head on this morning," Dennison declared.

"I haven't been to bed at all, if you want to know," I said.

"Going to the deuce with the rest of the college, well, you have the
consolation of being quite the most amusing man in it."

I think I was fool enough to say that I was not amusing.

"Not consciously," Dennison replied, "but I get more fun from you than
from anybody, and when you are in a serious mood you are the most comic
man I know. He's delicious, isn't he, Lambert?"

"If you can't see the funny side of our eight, you must be a madman,"
Lambert said to me.

"We used to be head of the river, and now we can't row for sour
apples," Dennison chuckled, "the thing's a perfect pantomime."

"And you are the stupidest clown in it," I said suddenly, for although
I did not want to lose my temper the "sour apples" expression, on the