ed unable to forget it belonged to the Dean. They nodded to Mr.
Ardle, the Senior Tutor, who blinked and sniffed and bowed nervously in
response. Fitzroy beamed at them: Smithers doubtfully eyed them. The two
freshmen reputed to be good sportsmen smiled grateful acknowledgments of
their condescension. Appleby waved his hand in a gesture of such bland
welcome that Lonsdale seemed to gibber with suppressed mortification and
rage.

"Will you lay five to one in bobs that I don't sit next the
Pumpkinette?" whispered Lonsdale to Michael, as they went downstairs to
dinner.

"Not a halfpenny," laughed Michael. "You will. And I shall get Ardle."

Upon the sage-green walls of the dining-room hung the portraits of three
dead Wardens, and though the usual effect of family pictures was to make
the living appear insignificant beside them, Michael felt that
Pumpkin-head even in the presence of his three ferocious and learned
forerunners had nothing to fear for his own preeminence. Modern life
found in him a figure carved out of the persistent attributes of his
office, and therefore already a symbol of the universal before his
personality had been hallowed by death or had expressed itself in its
ultimate form under the maturing touch of art and time. This quality in
the host diffused itself through the room in such a way that the whole
dinner party gained from it a dignity and a stability which made more
than usually absurd the superficial actions of eating and drinking, and
the general murmur of infinitely fugacious talk.

Michael taking his first glance round the table after the preliminary
shynesses of settling down, was as much thrilled by his consciousness of
the eternal reality of this dinner party as he would have been if by a
magical transference he could have suddenly found himself pursuing some
grave task in the picture of a Dutch master. He had been to many dinners
in Oxford of which commemorative photographs had been made by
flashlight, and afterward when he saw the print he could scarcely
believe in his own reality, still less in that of the dinner, so
ludicrously invented seemed every group. He wished now that a painter
would set himself the problem of preserving by his art some of these
transitory entertainments. He began to imagine himself with the
commission to set on record the present occasion. He wished for the
power to paint those deeper shadows in which the Warden's great round
face inclined slowly now toward