son he had been so
anxious for his partnership was to have an excuse to escape from an
arrangement made lightly enough with Maurice Avery in his first or
second term that in their third year they should dig together. Maurice
had supposed the other day that the arrangement stood, and Michael, not
wishing to hurt his feelings, had supposed so too. A few days later
Maurice had come along with news of rooms in Longwall. Should he engage
them? Michael said he hated Longwall as a prospective dwelling-place,
and Maurice had immediately deferred to his prejudice.

It was getting unpleasantly near a final arrangement, for the
indefatigable Maurice would produce address after address, until Michael
seemed bound ultimately to accept. Lonsdale and Grainger had invited him
to dig with them at 202 High. Michael suggested Maurice as well, but
they shook their heads. Wedderburn was already partially sharing, that
is to say, though he had his own sitting-room he was in the same house
and would no doubt join in the meals. Maurice was not to be thought of.
Maurice was a very good fellow but--Maurice was--but--and Michael in
asking Lonsdale and Grainger why they declined his company, asked
himself at the same time what were his own objections to digging with
Maurice. He tried to state them in as kindly a spirit as he could, and
for a while he told himself he wished to be in digs with people who
represented the broad stream of normal undergraduate life; he accused
himself in fact of snobbishness, and justified the snobbishness by
applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute. As time
went by, however, and Maurice produced rooms on rooms for Michael's
choice, he began almost to dislike him, to resent the assumption of a
desire to dig with him. Where was Maurice's sensitiveness that it could
not react to his unexpressed hatred of the idea of living with him? Soon
it would come to the point of declaring outright that he did not want to
dig with him. Such an announcement would really hurt his feelings, and
Michael did not want to do that. As soon as Maurice had receded into the
background of casual encountership, he would take pleasure in his
company again. Meanwhile, however, it really seemed as if Maurice were
losing all his superficial attractiveness. Michael wondered why he had
never before noticed how infallibly he ran after each new and petty
phase of art, how vain he was too, and how untidy. It was intolerable to
think of