Grainger, and Alan. Yet when Michael came
to think about it, six all told seemed a beggarly number for his first
terminal dinner. Already Michael began to think of his dinner as an
established ceremony of undergraduate society. He would like to choose a
number that should never vary every term. He knew that the guests would
change, that the place of its celebration would alter, but he felt that
some permanency must be kept, and Michael fixed upon eleven as the
number, ten guests and himself. For this first dinner five more must be
invited, and Michael without much further consideration selected five
freshmen whose athletic prowess and social amiableness drew them into
prominence. But when he had given all the invitations Michael was a
little depressed by the conventional appearance of his list. With the
exception of Alan as a friend from another college, and Avery, his list
was exactly the same as any that might have been drawn up by Grainger.
As Michael pondered it, he scented an effluence of correctness that
overpowered his individuality. However, when he sat at the head of the
table in the private room at the Mitre, and surveyed round the table his
terminal dinner party, he was after all glad that on this occasion he
had deferred to the prejudices of what in a severe moment of
self-examination he characterized as "snobbishness." In this room at the
Mitre with its faded red paper and pictures of rod and gun and
steeplechase, with its two waiters whiskered and in their garrulous
subservience eloquent of Thackerayan scenes, with its stuffed ptarmigan
and snipe and glass-enshrined giant perch, Michael felt that a more
eclectic society would have been out of place.

Only Avery's loose-fronted shirt marred the rigid convention of the
group.

"_Who's_ that man wearing a pie-frill?" whispered Alan sternly from
Michael's right.

Michael looked up at him with an expression of amused apprehension.

"Avery allows himself a little license," said Michael. "But, Alan, he's
really all right. He always wears his trousers turned up, and if you saw
him on Sunday you'd think he was perfectly dressed. All Old Carthusians
are."

But Alan still looked disapprovingly at Avery, until Lonsdale, who had
met Alan several times at the House, began to talk of friends they had
in common.

Michael was not altogether pleased with himself. He wished he had put
Avery on his left instead of Wedderburn. He disliked owning to himself
that he had