ugh the rain to Snutch's gloomy chambers. There was
nothing to do but to contemplate his own blunders classic and modern.
He told himself that he had made a rotten shot and received a nasty
snub. If he had only been aiming at something worth having, he
wouldn't have minded. But what, after all, was the use of a girl to
him? And why on earth had he wanted to grab her sticky hand--for it
had been sticky. He knew now that he hadn't really wanted to do it,
for its own sake: he had wanted to do it because other people did it.
Now it all seemed so hugely silly. "I suppose love's all right," he
thought to himself. "But this hand and kiss business is piffle."

On Friday evening Martin returned to Elfrey in a state of advanced
pessimism. Early in the next week he learned that he had been elected
to a classical scholarship at King's College. He gazed blankly at the
telegram and the words 'via strata' and 'ducem' flashed before his mind.

It was quite incredible, but it was true.

XII

Martin spent his last two terms without effort and without emotion.
The fact that he was a scholar elect of King's College, Oxford, caused
him to feel in some strange way that his career was made and that there
was nothing more to be done. So he chattered to Finney on Sunday
afternoons, read poetry (condescendingly now) at Mrs Berney's Saturday
soirees, and enjoyed the modern novelists when he should have been
doing his prep. He had found a copy of Butler's _Way of All Flesh_ in
his uncle's study: this he read with joy and lent to the more worthy
members of the Upper Sixth. A book with an appeal so universal
naturally made an effect: it seemed to crystallise the religious
experience of all. Martin was eager to discover whether Foskett had
read it and consequently alluded to it at some length in an essay on
'Recent Aspects of Evolution,' in which he courageously let himself go.
Foskett made no allusion to Butler and merely wrote on the last sheet:
'Good, but lacks balance. Don't dogmatise on subjects of this kind.
Many of your ideas, though well put, are crude.' Martin groaned as he
read the criticism. If Foskett had been a bigoted parson and had
lectured him on the perils of free thought, he could have looked on
himself as a martyr and enjoyed the nursing of a grievance: if, on the
other hand, the strength and sincerity of the essay had been genuinely
praised, Martin's vanity would have been gratified. But this kindly
tole