member and brandished it wildly, as a
symbol of his attitude to all things episcopal.

As usual it was Chard who closed the discussion.

"Davenant's faith," he said, "makes me think of a mendicant professor
of aesthetics and Rendell's of the first secretary of the Amalgamated
Society of Carpenters and Joiners (Nazareth branch). I move the
question be put."

His advice was taken.

"Beer," said Lawrence. "My god, more beer."

And so the evenings would begin.

III

Incredibly the Push were blind to their amazing superficiality. Even
had they suffered from an inclination to be serious, life came so
easily and so rapidly that it would have been impossible to do anything
but play with it. So they trifled with wisdom and trifled rightly.
For when a man is only nineteen and has enough to eat and drink, and
more than enough to read and say, it were a crime to stop in thought
and laboriously dam the pleasant shallows of an easy-going stream.
Alike in the winter nights by Lawrence's fire or by the lingering
twilights of early summer when they threaded a maze of back-waters or
lay in the cool fastness of the college garden listening to the wind in
the great elms or the tinkle of a distant piano, they built great
castles of argument, flimsy and fantastic piles untouched by reality
and doomed to fade away at the coming of Experience. They talked of
great things and small, of God and Woman and sometimes of Man, of
futures and careers, of the dons, of the college, of the varsity teams,
of books and plays and poets, of the coldness of the pretty girl in
this shop and of the wantonness of the plain girl in that.

They lived with an excellent method. In the mornings they lay in bed,
thought about breakfast, ate breakfast, and read the papers. In the
junior common-room there were all the dailies and on Wednesdays there
were _Punch_, _The Tatler_, _The Sketch_, and _The Bystander_, on
Saturdays the weekly reviews. They were catholic in the reading, but,
if the supply happened to give out, they could always consider what to
do in the afternoon. By that time it was one o'clock and they lunched
frugally and together. In the afternoon they took their various
amusements. Perhaps Lawrence and Martin played rugger, while Chard and
Davenant strolled round Addison Walk. Rendell insisted on playing
hockey, insisted in the face of opposition.

"You can't play hockey," said Martin. "It's no game for a gentleman."

"It's