‘That very good-looking friend of yours,’ asked my father. ‘Is he not with you?’

‘No.’

‘I quite thought he had taken this over as his home. I’m sorry, I liked him.’

‘Father, do you particularly want me to take my degree?’

‘I want you to? Good gracious, why should I want such a thing? No use to me. Not much use to you either, as far as I’ve seen.’

‘That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. I thought perhaps it was rather a waste of time going back to Oxford.’

Until then my father had taken only a limited interest in what I was saying: now he put down his book, took off his spectacles, and looked at me hard. ‘You’ve been sent down,’ he said. ‘My brother warned me of this.’

‘No, I’ve not.’

‘Well, then, what’s all the talk about?’ he asked testily, resuming his spectacles, searching for his place on the page. ‘Everyone stays up at least three years. I knew one man who took seven to get a pass degree in theology.’

‘I only thought that if I was not going to take up one of the professions where a degree is necessary, it might be best to start now on what I intend doing. I intend to be a painter.’

But to this my father made no answer at the time.

The idea, however, seemed to take root in his mind; by the time we spoke of the matter again it was firmly established.

‘When you’re a painter,’ he said at Sunday luncheon, ‘you’ll need a studio.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, there isn’t a studio here. There isn’t even a room you could use decently as a studio. I’m not going to have you painting in the gallery.’

‘No. I never meant to.’

‘Nor will I have undraped models all over the house, nor critics with their horrible jargon. And I don’t like the smell of turpentine. I presume you intend to do the thing thoroughly and use oil paint?’ My father belonged to a generation which divided painters into the serious and the amateur, according as they used oil or water.

‘I don’t suppose I should do much painting the first year. Anyway, I should be working at a school.’

‘Abroad?’ asked my father hopefully. ‘There are some excellent schools abroad, I believe.’

It was all happening rather faster than I intended.

‘Abroad or here. I should have to look round first.’

‘Look round abroad,’ he said.

‘Then you agree to my leaving Oxford?’

‘Agree? Agree? My dear boy, you’re twenty-two.’

‘Twenty,’ I said, ‘twenty-one in October.’

‘Is that all? It seems much longer.’

A letter from Lady Marchmain completes this episode.

‘My dear Charles,’ she wrote, ‘Sebastian left me this morning to join his father abroad. Before he went I asked him if he had written to you. He said no, so I must write, tho’ I can hardly hope to say in a letter what I could not say on our last walk. But you must not be left in silence.