forgot about India.

Most of all Freda mattered. Now that he was alone and despondent, he
relied on her letters and his memories and thoughts of her to make life
easier, even more tolerable. He retraced the whole course of their
friendship, trying to reshape their relations. He remembered her first
as an arguer, a friend to whom he had talked and talked: and then as a
martyr, the sufferer for whom he had felt with a genuine, unstinting
pity. And at last ... well, at last as a woman, as a person who had
the power of making life different, of turning London into an enchanted
fairyland and India into a vision of cool beauty, a person of infinite
tenderness and understanding, a person whose presence and sympathy
could stop things hurting. What rendered him most happy was his
ability to meet her on equal terms. Hitherto she had been
self-supporting, he a pampered undergraduate. He had had prospects but
no certainty, and he had shrunk, even on that summer night upon the
river, from saying things that he wanted to say, because he felt that
it wasn't fair. One couldn't honourably say these things until one was
'a made man': one couldn't decently make women expect things unless you
had some reasonable basis for hopes. With girls like May Williams it
didn't matter what one said, because he had been just a 'fellow,' she
just a 'girl.' Such affairs had their agreeable conventions. But with
Freda it had been different, because there was no such tacit agreement:
she might, she would expect him to take her out of her toil and
weariness. And now he was free to say and do as it pleased him. He
was 'made' and had position, for only by great folly and stupidity
could he lose his opportunity.

At the end of term he went up to London. He told the Berrisfords that
he had to go to a riding test at Woolwich and wanted to see the varsity
rugger match. It is odd that a young man should be instinctively
ashamed of love: he will tell his companions of his bodily desires
gladly and even proudly, but he will hesitate before he confesses a
craving for sympathy. He did ride, it is true, and he went to Queen's
Club, where he caught an occasional glimpse of Cambridge three-quarters
running abominably fast. It was one of the 'slump' years in Oxford
football, the reaction after the reign of the immortals at Iffley Road,
when the whole city and university trooped down to watch six elusive
Internationals playing with the opposition's defe