rtin that in this town,
with its new yellow banks and new college buildings, such hypocrisy
should go on and that people should confuse the relics of medieval
squalor with the works of medieval beauty. He came from a clean town
of the hills, and the clinging dirt and the sordid grime and meanness
of St Ebbs seemed haunting and insistent. Before Tom Tower and the
spacious splendour of Christ Church there was a common slum; he had
never pictured Oxford a place of slums. The Thames, too, had been in
flood for two or three weeks, and in the playing-fields across the
river goal-posts stood up amid acres of water, gauntly desolate. As he
passed out along the Abingdon Road he found meadows where the floods
had receded and left the grass rotten and stinking. The straggling
squalor of Oxford's edge only served to increase his despair: he had
expected to find a city with dreaming spires, and so far he had found
merely a slum, with yellow gasworks. Only now and then did he catch a
glimpse which charmed him. As he turned back and climbed the hill to
Carfax he began to loathe the place. But it must be remembered that he
had had an inadequate lunch and was under the shadow of an exam.

On returning to Snutch's rooms he found that the fire had almost gone
out. With the aid of _The University_ he managed to create a fitful
gleam, but it gave no heat. Someone was moving about in the rooms
opposite, another scholarship candidate presumably, a rival--damn him!
Martin began to think about tea: he did not know what to do and his
scout was not coming till six. Ultimately he went out to the Cadena
Cafe: it was full of young women from North Oxford who sat in
mackintoshes, feeding with desperate gaiety.

After he came back to Snutch's rooms and read a shilling novel which he
had found in the bedder. Soon after six the scout appeared and told
Martin that he could dine in the hall at seven: he was a large, grimy
man and sniffed prodigiously. Dinner in hall was very trying.
Half-a-dozen dons sat at the high table trying to pretend by forced
conversation that they were not thoroughly sick of one another: about
thirty schoolboys sat shyly on the long benches, apprehensive,
miserable. Here and there would be two from the same school, chatting
with animation and appearing to be very much in the know about Life and
the varsity: elsewhere strangers were huddled together, some silent,
others making fitful conversation. Financial distinct