the more he likes you."

"I'm fairly in love with you, Coalheaver," Dennison said.

"Naturally, but you might forget that very witty name."

"I'm going," Lambert declared, "for I'm dining in hall, and if I don't
go for a walk those kromeskis and quenelles will choke me."

"Half a minute," and Ward pushed Lambert back into his seat; "now we
are all here, I think we had better arrange a freshers' wine. There
always is one, and nobody will get it up if we don't, so I vote we do
the thing properly."

Every one seemed to approve of the idea, but as I was no use at making
arrangements I suggested that Ward should manage the whole business.

"I can order everything, but we must have a committee to choose the
people we shall ask and all that part of it. We can't ask everybody,"
Ward said.

"Half of them won't come if we do. I should think we had better ask
the whole lot, and then we shall know what they are made of," Lambert
advised.

"We shan't have a room big enough to hold them," Collier said.

After that we all began to talk, and though I had only a hazy notion of
what we decided, I heard enough to know that Ward and Dennison meant
having this wine in about ten days and only intended to ask the
freshers whom they liked.

CHAPTER IV

UNEXPECTED PEOPLE

The idea of working for Mr. Gilbert Edwardes never had much attraction
for me, and for the first two or three weeks at Oxford I found it very
difficult to satisfy him. However, the excuse that I took a long time
to settle down in a fresh place did not seem as reasonable to him as it
did to me, so I had to abandon it and try to appease him. The worst of
him was that I never knew whether he was pleased or not; he accepted my
most determined efforts at scholarship as a matter of course and
reserved his eloquence for the occasions on which my work showed
symptoms of haste. In less than a fortnight I felt that my tutor and I
were watching each other, an element of distrust seemed to have sprung
up; he took it for granted that I would do as little as possible, while
I was searching for something which could tell me that he was human as
well as learned.

I could not understand him in the least, for I had been accustomed to
masters who talked about things of which I knew a little even if they
were bored by doing so; but when I met Mr. Edwardes I felt that he
belonged to the ice period, and that he would think the smallest thaw a
waste of time.

I do lik