he sound of it hurt him. How could she waste
herself on that correct, that unutterably correct, young Liberal?

Why was life so full of silliness, of waste and bungling? Why ... but
one thing was certain--he would never, never forget her.

BOOK TWO

UNIVERSITY

I

"These 'ere deemagogues ... it's them as battens on the worker."

Martin woke with a start. He looked round his slovenly 'bedder'
vaguely. His scout, Mr Algernon Galer, was slowly pouring out cold
water into a bath and continuing last night's conversation. It was
typical of Galer that he never dropped a conversation until he
considered it completed, until, that is to say, by his fiendish ability
to bore he had reduced the other side to silence. At present Martin
had no other acquaintance in King's, for he had only come up on the
previous evening. On reaching his rooms he found that the cupboard had
been filled with a quantity of jam and pickles and other kinds of food,
all carefully opened, so that they could not be returned if disliked by
the purchaser. Galer pointed them out with pride as though they
testified his devotion to Martin's welfare. There was nothing Galer
did not know about the ways of looking after a fresher.

This Galer was a small, bunched-up, greasy man with a ragged black
moustache, scarlet cheeks, and great watery eyes underhung by bags of
loose skin. During the mornings he shuffled about the stair in a pink
shirt, green fancy waistcoat, grey flannel trousers, and lurid yellow
boots; later on he retired with a large black bag to the Iffley Road,
where he was supposed to maintain a timid wife and innumerable
children. It was a matter of conjecture among the residents on Galer's
stair whether he wrapped up the coal in newspaper or whether the bag
contained coal and food exquisitely mingled. By the afternoon the bag
had always achieved a certain bulk and wore a swollen look. But it was
as a politician that Galer excelled. No truer Tory than Galer ever
voted for Valentia or took the Empire to heart. He did not exactly
know where the map was red or how it became red; not that that would
have mattered, for Galer was not the man to be worried about little
points of honesty. But he knew that much of the map was red, and he
was genuinely glad about it: it seemed to him a logical inference and a
capital idea that the map should be all red.

Of the catch-word he was a master. Few conversations with Galer were
allowed