was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was content in
this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones, the trend
of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of his outlook
by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college. Even Alan he
seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it seemed to him
essential to move cautiously and always under the protection of numbers.
These freshmen in their first term found a curious satisfaction in
numbers. When they lunched together, they lunched in eights and twelves;
when they dined out of college, as they sometimes did, at the Clarendon
or the Mitre or the Queen's, they gathered in the lodge almost in the
dimensions of a school-treat.

"Why do we always go about in such quantity?" Michael once asked
Wedderburn.

"What else can we do?" answered Wedderburn. "We must subject each other
to--I mean--we haven't got any clubs yet. We're bound to stick
together."

"Well, I'm getting rather fed up with it," said Michael. "I feel more
like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take
coffee and tea in great masses of people. I'm bored to tears by half the
men I go about with, and I'm sure they're bored to tears with me. We
don't talk about anything but each other's schools and whether A is a
better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it's true that D
isn't really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books; and
every other evening about twelve people come and read them over each
other's shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette ash
off the pictures. And when they've all read the story of the nightingale
in the Decameron, they sit up till one o'clock discussing who of our
year is most likely to be elected president of the J. C. R. four years
from now."

But for all Michael's grumbling through that first term he was beginning
to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at Oxford which
in the years to come he would remember. There was Wedderburn himself
whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and episcopal voice masked a
butterfly of a temperament that flitted from flower to flower of
artistic experiment or danced attendance upon freshmen, the honey of
whose future fame he seemed always able to probe.

"I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself," said
Michael. "And yet I don't think it is snobbishness. I believe it's a
form of collecting. It's