‘I’ll tell you why he should look through plain glass,’ he said, ‘if you really can’t think it out for yourself. He should do it so as not to make himself look a bloody fool. By wearing a monocle he just made himself bloody conspicuous. Everybody looking at him wherever he went. And that’s what he did it for. You know that as well as we do. He just wanted to draw attention to himself.’

Something had got into Charles. He felt a mad compulsion to bait Burge. He insisted on dragging out the argument. The fourth form boy was defying the Head Prefect, the hospital orderly standing up to the almost-qualified doctor. The other guests began to look uncomfortable.

‘Look, Burge,’ he said hotly and roughly. ‘You talk about this bird Reilly drawing attention to himself. Now you were captain of the College rugger team, weren’t you?’

Burge just managed a nod. His face was totally without expression, save for the faint sneer that never left it, even when he was asleep at night.

‘When you scored a try,’ Charles persisted, ‘and the spectators applauded, can you honestly deny that you were glad that there were spectators present, and that you had done something that pleased them so that they applauded? Weren’t you glad of their admiration?’

Not even a nod this time. Burge simply stared at him with fixed loathing.

‘Didn’t you, in other words, believe, or act as if you believed, that there are some forms of drawing attention to oneself, as you call it, that are harmless or even good?’

‘Blimey,’ said a youth in a yellow pullover, affecting a Cockney accent, ‘ain’t we ’alf getting Socratic?’

One or two people tittered, in an attempt to break the tension. But Burge had set down his glass on the table and was staring at Charles. His face had gone a dull red.

‘You always were liable to say bloody silly things. I must say I thought after I went down I should have heard the last of people saying bloody silly things.’

‘Answer my point,’ snapped Charles. He was losing his temper: this was getting serious.

‘I’ll answer your bloody point,’ Burge said in the ‘dangerously cool’ voice he had used to over-awe children of twelve when he was a prefect. (‘If he speaks to you quietly it’s a beating: if he shouts you’re all right’, the white-faced urchins had told one another.) He advanced towards Charles, and halted about six feet away, holding himself unnaturally erect.