lly come round to say," interposed Stewart, "is that
there's an O.L.G. dinner to-night at the Grid; and then afterward we're
all going across to my digs opposite."

"And what about lunch with me?"

Both Maurice and Nigel excused themselves. Maurice intended to spend all
day at the Union. Nigel had booked himself to play fug-socker with three
hearty Trindogs of Trinity.

"But when did you join the Union?" Michael asked the editor.

"I thought it was policy," he explained. "After all, though we laugh at
it here, most of the Varsity does belong. Besides, Townsend and Bill
Mowbray were both keen. You see they think the O.L.G. is going to have
an influence in Varsity politics. And, after all, I am editor."

"You certainly are," Michael agreed. "Nothing quite so editorial was
ever conceived by the overwrought brain of a disappointed female
contributor."

Michael always enjoyed dining at the Grid. Of all the Oxford clubs it
seemed to him to display the most completely normal undergraduate
existence. Vincent's, notwithstanding its acknowledged chieftaincy,
depended ultimately too much on a mechanically apostolic succession. It
was an institution to be admired without affection. It had every
justification for calling itself The Club without any qualifying prefix,
but it produced a type too highly specialized, and was too definitely
Dark Blue and Leander Pink. In a way, too, it belonged as much to
Cambridge, and although violently patriotic had merged its individuality
in brawn. By its substitution of co-option for election, its Olympic
might was now scarcely much more than the self-deification of Roman
Emperors. Vincent's was the last stronghold of muscular supremacy. Yet
it was dreadfully improbable, as Michael admitted to himself, that he
would have declined the offer of membership.

The O.U.D.S. was at the opposite pole from Vincent's, and if it did not
offend by its reactionary encouragement of a supreme but discredited
spirit, it offended even more by fostering a premature worldliness. For
an Oxford club to take in The Stage and The Era was merely an exotic
heresy. On the walls of its very ugly room the pictures of actors that
in Garrick Street would have possessed a romantic dignity produced an
effect of strain, a proclamation of mounte-bank-worship that differed
only in degree from the photographs of actresses on the mantelpiece of a
second-rate room in a second-rate college. The frequenters of the
O.U.D.S. were a