Honorable Lonsdale is all
freshmen. Mr. Templeton-Collins and Mr. Bannerman is second year. Mr.
Templeton-Collins had the rooms on the ground floor last term. Very
noisy gentleman. Very fond of practicing with a coach-horn. And he don't
improve," said Porcher meditatively.

"Do you mean on the coach-horn?" Michael asked.

"Don't improve in the way of noise. Noise seems to regular delight him.
He'd shout the head off of a deaf man. Did you bring any wine, sir?"

Michael shook his head.

"Mr. Lonsdale brought too much. Too much. It's easier to order it as you
want it from the Junior Common Room. Anything else, sir?"

Michael tried to think of something to detain for a while the voluble
service of Porcher, but as he seemed anxious to be gone, he confessed
there was nothing.

Left alone again, Michael began to unpack his pictures. Somehow those
black and red scenes of Montmartre and the landscapes of the Sussex
downs with a slight atmosphere of Japan seemed to him unsatisfactory in
this new room, and he hung them forthwith in his bedroom. For his
sitting-room he resolved to buy certain pictures that for a long time he
had coveted--Mona Lisa and Primavera and Rembrandt's Knight in Armor and
Montegna's St. George. Those other relics of faded and jejune
aspirations would label him too definitely. People would see them
hanging on his walls and consider him a decadent. Michael did not wish
to be labeled in his first term. Oxford promised too much of
intellectual romance and adventure for him to set out upon his Odyssey
with the stepping-stones of dead tastes hung round his neck. Oxford
should be approached with a stainless curiosity. Already he felt that
she would only yield her secret in return for absolute surrender. This
the grave city demanded.

After his pictures Michael unpacked his books. The deep shelves set in
the wall beside the fireplace looked alluring in their emptiness, but
when he had set out in line all the books he possessed, they seemed a
scanty and undistinguished crowd. The pirated American edition of
Swinburne alone carried itself with an air: the Shelley and the Keats
were really editions better suited to the glass and gloom of a seaside
lodging: the school-books looked like trippers usurping the gothic
grandeur of these shelves. Moreover, the space was eked out with
tattered paper editions that with too much room at their disposal
collapsed with an appearance of ill-favored intoxication. Michael