ubbed about in hedges,
and Nina and I often met them at some place to have tea. It wasn't
very exciting, for I had always to carry the kettle and the things to
eat; but the sun shone most of the time, which was really a blessing,
because on wet days Owen persuaded me to work in the afternoons as well
as the mornings, and that was more than I had ever thought of doing in
a vac.

I suppose Owen was what is generally called a smug, but he was not one
by choice but by compulsion, which is the best kind I should think. He
was so totally different from any other kind of friend I have ever had
that I sometimes caught myself wondering whether I really liked him.
But I could always satisfy myself about that, for there was one thing
about him which no one could help liking; he was most tremendously
clever and never tried to make out that he was, and having already seen
plenty of people who were about as clever as I was, and who talked as
if they were Solomon and Solon rolled into one, I was grateful to him.
We got on very well together, though we had not got a single thing in
common, except that we both liked sunshine; and that can't be said to
be much, for I have only met one man in England who did not like the
sun, and he had been affected, permanently, by too much of it.

Men get blamed freely enough for putting on side about playing cricket
and football well, and they deserve all they get, but the men who put
on intellectual side ought, I think, to be spoken to more severely,
because they get worse as they get older, while the first sort of side
generally dies an early death. Owen was a kind of encyclopaedia, who
did not air or advertise himself, and I thought him a very rare
specimen. Athletics meant no more to him than botany or butterflies
meant to me, but when he went away my father said emphatically that it
was refreshing to think Oxford turned out some men who took interest in
useful things. I did not answer that remark, because he did not really
know very much about Oxford, and his occasional hobby was that the
country was being ruined by too many games. "A very well-conducted
young man," he said of Owen, "always up in the morning, and always
ready to go to bed at night."

"He looked much better when he went away than when he came," my mother
said; "I hope we shall see him down here again."

"I think he means to make a name for himself," Miss Read added; "he
knows exactly what he wants."

Nina yawned, and a