‘That’s my name,’ Charles assented cautiously, mumbling on a rapid undertone, ‘not sure where had the pleasure remember face of course, let me see.’

The woman, who clearly did not share in the embarrassment, leaned forward with an encouraging smile.

‘We’re George Hutchins’s mother and dad,’ she volun­teered kindly. ‘We met you when we came up to see him at the College.’

At once Charles remembered a scene which he would gladly have forgotten. George Hutchins, an unpleasantly dogged and humour­less young man, had lived on the same staircase and had indulged a taste for lecturing Charles on the virtues of hard work. ‘No system,’ he would say contemptuously, looking round at Charles’s bookcase, ‘just a random collection of texts, no real system. You’re just playing at it. Now I can’t afford to play at it. I go over each little plot of the subject carefully. Preliminary survey, then a closer reading, and then, three months later, revision. And the whole thing’s tied up. That’s how these men like Lockwood have got where they are, and I’m going after them.’ Lockwood was a dreary whey-faced tutor of the college for whom Hutchins had a deep and sincere admiration, and who encouraged him along the road to complacent prigdom. After one of these lectures, Charles would sit staring into the fire, inert and crumpled; the half-­fantastic, half-shrewd gleams and pin-points of intuition which served him as a substitute for intellectual method damped and fizzling out in the clammy atmosphere of Hutchins’s brutal efficiency.

‘I s’pose you’ve heard all about George’s success,’ said Mr. Hutchins; his voice was bright and confident, but with a curious undertone of bewilderment and pathos. ‘He’s got a Fellowship,’ he added, using the strange word in inverted commas, grafting it like some strange twig on to the stunted trunk of his artisan’s vocabulary.