re for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't to be
thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for
getting things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. Good
God! what do you think a university's for?"...

Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of
us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were going
to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see what
came of it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, and
one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent psychic investigator,
took hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our great
elucidation.

The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion
of sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in
our intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our
imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went
round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall prolonged
discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to
Madingley, when amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serious
treatment of so obsolete a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, for
the institution of marriage. The fine dim night-time spaces of the Great
Court are bound up with the inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared
wrangles; the narrows of Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill
have their particular associations for me with that spate of confession
and free speech, that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and
crappled and sometimes crippled ideas.

And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough
in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that goes under a
bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed
and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the body until at moments
it seemed to us that we were destined to restore the Golden Age, by the
simple abolition of tailors and outfitters.

Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how
splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething minds!
We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards Arundel,
and would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing
and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, and
grieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fit
to