with us I
finished off by making one hundred and thirty-six against him at stump
cricket. When he went away I had changed my opinion of him, but my
father was annoyed that he could behave like a boy when it was time for
me to forget that I was one. "You are as silly as the bishop," became
one of my father's favourite remarks, until my mother asked him to
think of something which was not quite so rude.

The bishop had really been splendid while he was staying with us,
because Nina, having arrived at the age of eighteen, was very difficult
to please. Some man in my brother's regiment had been down and said
that her pug was an angel, and I being unable to reach such heights as
that was compared to my disadvantage with this man. I am nearly sure,
too, that she wanted to flirt with Fred, quite regardless of the fact
that he was no use at flirting, and I should have had something to say
if he had been. In a short year she had changed most dreadfully, and
was no longer satisfied with being liked very much. She was a puzzle
to me, and had it not been for the bishop, who smoothed things over, I
should probably have worried her far more than I did.

His letter did not contain one word of cant; he just wished me good
luck, and told me to write to him whenever I felt that he could be of
use to me. A less sensible man might have preached to me and talked
about the "threshold of a career"; but, thank goodness, he knew what I
wanted, and that if I had not made up my mind to let Oxford do
something for me, I was hopeless from the start.

CHAPTER II

INTERVIEWS

I soon found out that Jack Ward was of a most friendly disposition, for
he came over to my rooms before ten o'clock the following morning and
bounced in with an air of having known me all my life. At the moment I
was talking to a man called Murray, whose acquaintance I had made an
hour before. My introduction to Murray could hardly be called formal;
he lived in the next rooms to me and at precisely the same time each of
us had poked our heads into the passage and shouted for our scout. We
then looked at each other and laughed, and the deed was done. I wish
that I could have made all my friends at Oxford as easily; it would
have saved so much time.

Murray was going as Ward came in, and they nodded and said
"Good-morning" in the way men do when they don't altogether love one
another.

"You seem to know everybody," I said, without much reason, as soon as