For Burge contained within himself all the unpleasant charac­teristics of Robert Tharkles and Hutchins combined, while blending and applying them in a way that was all his own. Charles disliked him too much to be able to pity him, and yet he, too, was one of the disabled. At first profoundly uneasy at exchanging the seniority and power of his last year at school for the insignificance of his first year at the University, he had quickly remedied this sense of insecurity, partly by making no new friends—he confined himself entirely to the set who had come up from his school and their immediate cronies—and partly by taking advantage of the fact that a University career is very short, only three years for most men, and therefore a medical student, whose course takes much longer, easily becomes a senior figure in the Junior Common Room as he stays on year after year. By the time Charles had come up as a freshman, Burge was already in his fourth year, and had devoted himself with complete success to reproducing the milieu in which he had been so happy and successful as a Head Prefect. Charles, inclined to be lazy and tolerant, had welcomed the University largely—almost solely—because it meant the maximum release from the atmosphere of school with its incessant discipline and public spirit, and he had been roused from his lethargy to several open clashes with Burge: who now nodded to him coldly before resuming his conversation. It was, charac­teristically, on the very topic—the war of the athletes and the aesthetes—about which Charles had been musing as he walked up the path.

‘Remember Reilly?’ he was saying. ‘My God, he was a fool. He was a bloody fool. Remember that bloody monocle he used to wear?’

The others laughed. They were quite good humoured: but Burge was angry. When he thought of this man Reilly, who had worn a monocle, he wanted to seek him out and do him some physical injury. Something inside Charles prompted him to ignore all the dictates of common sense and speak out.

‘Perhaps he wore a monocle because he had something wrong with one eye,’ he said.

Burge turned to face him. ‘Won’t wash,’ he said curtly. ‘If he had something wrong with one eye, why didn’t he simply wear a pair of spectacles? He could have had ordinary plain glass in the good eye.’ He spoke rapidly and impatiently, as if it were only just worth his trouble to answer such a foolish remark.

Charles, insanely, persisted.

‘Why should he look through plain glass with his good eye when he could see all right without looking through anything at all?’

Burge now gave him his full attention. He spoke so that those guests who had been talking to one another stopped and listened.