otisms, William Morris's
limited editions and luxurious wall-papers, and Walter Crane's charmingly
absurd ideal working men, about as much as he hated Wedderburn. The
dissertations in the laboratory, that had been his glory in the previous
term, became a danger, degenerated into inglorious tussels with
Wedderburn, and Hill kept to them only out of an obscure perception that
his honour was involved. In the debating society Hill knew quite clearly
that, to a thunderous accompaniment of banged desks, he could have
pulverised Wedderburn. Only Wedderburn never attended the debating society
to be pulverised, because--nauseous affectation!--he "dined late."

You must not imagine that these things presented themselves in quite such
a crude form to Hill's perception. Hill was a born generaliser. Wedderburn
to him was not so much an individual obstacle as a type, the salient angle
of a class. The economic theories that, after infinite ferment, had shaped
themselves in Hill's mind, became abruptly concrete at the contact. The
world became full of easy-mannered, graceful, gracefully-dressed,
conversationally dexterous, finally shallow Wedderburns, Bishops
Wedderburn, Wedderburn M.P.'s, Professors Wedderburn, Wedderburn
landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and epigrammatic cities of
refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone ill-clothed or ill-dressed,
from the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a man and a brother, a
fellow-sufferer, to Hill's imagination. So that he became, as it were, a
champion of the fallen and oppressed, albeit to outward seeming only a
self-assertive, ill-mannered young man, and an unsuccessful champion at
that. Again and again a skirmish over the afternoon tea that the girl
students had inaugurated left Hill with flushed cheeks and a tattered
temper, and the debating society noticed a new quality of sarcastic
bitterness in his speeches.

You will understand now how it was necessary, if only in the interests of
humanity, that Hill should demolish Wedderburn in the forthcoming
examination and outshine him in the eyes of Miss Haysman; and you will
perceive, too, how Miss Haysman fell into some common feminine
misconceptions. The Hill-Wedderburn quarrel, for in his unostentatious way
Wedderburn reciprocated Hill's ill-veiled rivalry, became a tribute to her
indefinable charm; she was the Queen of Beauty in a tournament of scalpels
and stumpy pencils. To her confidential friend's secret annoyance, it even
tro