ays been cold and unintelligent as a doll's.

"I really must have been mad when I was young," Michael said to himself.
"And yet other people have preserved the influence they used to have
over me. Other people haven't changed. Why should he? I wonder whether
it was always myself I saw in him: my own evil genius?"

Chator came to fetch him while he was worrying over Barnes' lapse into
unimportance, and together they passed through the sacristy into the
Clergy House.

Nigel Stewart's room, which they visited in the minutes before supper,
had changed very little from his digs in the High. Ely had added a
picture or two; that was all. Nor had Nigel changed, except that his
clerical attire made him more seraphic than ever. While he and Michael
chattered of Oxford friends, Chator stood with his back to the fire
beaming at the reunion which he felt he had brought about: his biretta
at a military angle gave him a look of knowing benevolence.

The bell sounded for supper, and they went along corridors hung with
Arundel prints and faded photographs of cathedrals, until they came to a
brightly lit room where it seemed that quite twenty people were going to
sit down at the trestle-table. Michael was introduced to the Vicar and
two more curates, and also to a dozen church workers who made the same
sort of jokes about whatever dish they were helping. Also he met that
walrus-like man who, whether as organist or ceremonarius or treasurer of
club accounts or vicar's churchwarden, is always to be found attached to
the clergy. Michael sat next to him, as it happened, and found he had a
deep voice and was unable to get nearer to "th" than "v."

"We're raver finking," he confided to Michael over a high-heaped plate,
"of starting Benediction, vis year."

"That will be wonderful," said Michael politely.

"Yes, it ought to annoy ver poor old Bishop raver."

The walrus-like man chuckled and bent over his food with a relish
stimulated by such a prospect. After supper the two curates carried off
their favorites upstairs to their own rooms; and as Chator, Stewart, and
Michael were determined to spend the evening together, the Vicar was
left with rather more people than usual to smoke his cigarettes.

"I envy you people," said Michael, as the three of them sank down into
deep wicker chairs. "I envy this power you have to bring Oxford--or
Cambridge--into London. For it is the same spirit in terms of action,
isn't it? And you're free from th