I had come up with a big reputation from
Cliborough. Perhaps I was encouraged too much, or possibly I had eaten
too heavy a luncheon, for whatever reputation I might have had before
the game began, was effectually dispersed before we had finished
playing; and Foster, who was playing three-quarters on the other side,
was the man who assisted me in this dismally easy task. Four times he
came right away from everybody, and once he slipped down in front of
me, but on the other three occasions he simply swerved away from me and
I missed him by yards. The man who had been full back to the 'Varsity
XV. the year before had gone down, and Foster had put into my head the
idea that I ought to have a jolly good chance of getting my blue. This
match was a very rude blow, and when I put on my coat and walked out of
the parks I felt that I had been very badly treated. I was not at all
sure with whom I was most angry, but I had a general feeling that
whatever I tried to do went most hopelessly wrong, and that I was much
better fitted to sit in a dog-cart with Jack Ward, than I was to stand
up in a footer-field and be made a fool of by Fred Foster.

As luck would have it the first man I saw when I went into the college
was Ward, and he shouted with laughter when he saw me.

"I went down to the parks to see you," he said, "but for heaven's sake
don't look so down on your luck. I don't see that it matters, there
are other things worth doing besides trying to collar impossible
people. If you don't have to play again I shall think you are
thundering well out of it."

If anybody had said this to me at school I should have thought that he
was mad, but during the few days I had been at Oxford I had somehow or
other got hopelessly mixed up. Foster wanted me to do one thing,
Murray advised me to do another, Ward kept on asking me to slack, and a
fellow called Dennison, whom I had met several times, seemed to think
that Oxford was a tremendous joke and that the most amusing people in
it were the dons.

At any rate I was not in the least angry at Ward's way of taking my
wretched exhibition, so I asked him and Dennison and two or three other
freshers, who were standing around in the quad, to come and have tea
with me, and that tea was the beginning of my first big row. I had not
finished my bath when I was sorry I had asked them, for I remembered
that before the game had begun Foster had asked me to go round
afterwards to see him, and