I had a sort of feeling that if he had made
an idiot of himself, and I had caused him to do so, he would have most
certainly not been as angry as I was. However, I had let myself in for
this tea and had to go through with it, and I must say that it was very
good fun.

If, as some wit said, only a dull man can be brilliant at breakfast, it
seems to me that if the converse of this is true St. Cuthbert's must
have contained an extraordinary number of brilliant men. The
amusements of a breakfast given by a senior man to half-a-dozen
freshers were principally food and silence. It is, I think, dreadfully
difficult to talk to a batch of freshers, and only one man, as far as
my experience went, overcame the difficulty. He resorted to the simple
means of telling us what a wonderful man he was. But when we were
alone we chattered like a lot of starlings, every one talked and no one
listened, so we got on well together.

Ward and Dennison came up to my rooms before I was dressed, and two
other men, Lambert and Collier, arrived soon afterwards. It was a
party of which Ward strongly approved. While I was trying to make the
kettle boil, I heard Dennison say that we were the pick of the
freshers, a statement which no one was very likely to deny. I felt
badly in need of some tonic after my afternoon, and I swallowed the one
provided by Dennison without any hesitation, not stopping to wonder how
often he had said the same thing to other men. As a matter-of-fact we
were rather an odd lot to be the pick of anybody.

Dennison looked younger than any boy in the sixth form at Cliborough,
and he could, on occasions, blush most bashfully. His blush was,
however, the only bashful thing about him and he used it very seldom.
Ward had told me that although Dennison looked such a kid he knew a
tremendous lot. I discovered this for myself later on, but I cannot
say that his knowledge was the kind which is difficult to acquire. He
professed a wholesale contempt for any game at which he could get his
mouth full of dirt, and said that he would as soon make mud-pies as
play football.

Lambert was hugely tall and walked with a stride which was as long as
it was stately. He went in for dressing himself beautifully, strummed
on the banjo, and had a playful little habit of arranging his tie in
any mirror which he saw. His pride in himself was so monstrously open
that no one with a grain of humour could be angry with him. He talked
about