‘It wasn’t one of my party. It was someone from out of college.’

‘Well, it’s just as nasty clearing it up, whoever it was.’

‘There’s five shillings on the sideboard.’

‘So I saw and thank you, but I’d rather not have the money and not have the mess, any morning.’

I took my gown and left him to his task. I still frequented the lecture-room in those days, and it was after eleven when I returned to college. I found my room full of flowers; what looked like, and, in fact, was, the entire day’s stock of a market-stall stood in every conceivable vessel in every part of the room. Lunt was secreting the last of them in brown paper preparatory to taking them home.

‘Lunt, what is all this?’

‘The gentleman from last night, sir, he left a note for you.’

The note was written in conté crayon on a whole sheet of my choice Whatman H.P. drawing paper: I am very contrite. Aloysius won’t speak to me until he sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon today. Sebastian Flyte. It was typical of him, I reflected, to assume I knew where he lived; but, then, I did know.

‘A most amusing gentleman, I’m sure it’s quite a pleasure to clean up after him. I take it you’re lunching out, sir. I told Mr Collins and Mr Partridge so – they wanted to have their commons in here with you.’

‘Yes, Lunt, lunching out.’

That luncheon party – for party it proved to be – was the beginning of a new epoch in my life.

I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was alone when I came, peeling a plover’s egg taken from the large nest of moss in the centre of his table.

‘I’ve just counted them,’ he said. ‘There were five each and two over, so I’m having the two. I’m unaccountably hungry today. I put myself unreservedly in the hands of Dolbear and Goodall, and feel so drugged that I’ve begun to believe that the whole of yesterday evening was a dream. Please don’t wake me up.’

He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

His room was filled with a strange jumble of objects – a harmonium in a gothic case, an elephant’s-foot waste-paper basket, a dome of wax fruit, two disproportionately large Sèvres vases, framed drawings by Daumier – made all the more incongruous by the austere college furniture and the large luncheon table. His chimney-piece was covered in cards of invitation from London hostesses.