t's to be
hoped, I'm shore, that next term's comings-ins from St. John's will be
half as nice. Yerse, I shall be very pleased to have these coverlets--I
suppose you would call them coverlets--and you're leaving the shelves in
the dining-room? Yerse, I'm shore they'll be as handy as anything for
the cruets and what not. And so you're going to have a dinner here to
eleven gentlemen--oh, eleven in all, yerse, I see."

It was going to be rather difficult, Michael thought, to find exactly
the ten people he wished to invite to this last terminal dinner. Alan,
Grainger, and Castleton, of course. Bill Mowbray and Vernon Townsend.
And Smithers. Certainly, he would ask Smithers. And why not George
Appleby, who was Librarian of the Union this term, and no longer
conceivable as that lackadaisical red rag which had fluttered Lonsdale
to fury? What about the Dean? And if the Dean, why not Harbottle, his
History tutor? And for the tenth place? It was really impossible to
choose from the dozen or so acquaintances who had an equal claim upon
it. He would leave the tenth place vacant, and just to amuse his own
fancy he would fill it with the ghost of himself in the December of his
first term.

Michael, when he saw his guests gathered in the sea-green dining-room of
99 St. Giles, knew that this last terminal dinner was an anachronism.
After all, the prime and bloom of these eclectic entertainments had been
in the two previous years. This was not the intimate and unusual society
he had designed to gather round him as representative of his four years
at the Varsity. This was merely representative of the tragical
incompleteness of Oxford. It was certainly a very urbane evening, but it
was somehow not particularly distinctive of Oxford, still less of
Michael's existence there. Perhaps it had been a mistake to invite the
two dons. Perhaps everyone was tired under the strain of Schools.
Michael was glad when the guests went and he sat alone in the
window-seat with Alan.

"To-morrow, my mother and Stella are coming up," he reminded Alan. "It's
rather curious my mother shouldn't have been up all the time, until I'm
really down."

"Is that man Avery coming up?" Alan asked.

Michael nodded.

"I suppose your people see a good deal of him now he's in town," said
Alan, trying to look indifferent to the answer.

"Less than before he went," said Michael. "Stella's rather off studios
and the Vie de Boheme."

"Oh, he has a studio?"

"Didn't y