It was therefore a long way from Charles’s mind that anyone might interrupt his reverie, still less that they should abruptly thrust themselves into his notice. He almost staggered with sur­prise when an ungainly, unkempt figure, registered by his eye a moment before as a heap of old clothes at the foot of a tree, sprang suddenly to its feet with a hoarse cry of ‘Lumley, I dreamt about you last night!’

Spinning round to peer into the bloodshot eyes that glowed behind the lank hair, Charles recognized a College acquaintance, Edwin Froulish.

Without knowing Froulish particularly well during their under­graduate years, Charles had known a good deal about him; inevitably, for Froulish had exploited his natural gift for self-advertisement with tremendous perseverance and zeal. From early adolescence he had seen himself as the boy who, though as yet undistinguished in the eyes of the world, would reveal himself in due season as a great novelist. His whole life was lived in the pages of that monumental biography which was to be written, after his death, by some short-sighted silver-haired professor: every incident in his profoundly ordinary existence was already trans­lated, in his mind, into the professor’s stately academic prose. He saw the running titles at the head of each page: ‘A Hampshire Boyhood’, ‘Passion for Butterflies’, ‘Early Unconventionality’, ‘A Tyrant Defied’ (the last heading would refer to his refusal, at the age of thirteen, to do an imposition unjustly set by the Physics master: it was the one courageous action he had to his credit, and he had been caned and the imposition doubled as a result). Long before leaving school he had sought out and read attentively any accounts of the boyhood of great writers. Most of them had shown an uncanny skill in the business of providing material for quotable anecdotes. Pope had been expelled from his first school for writing a satire on the master, Southey for declaring himself opposed to corporal punishment; Tennyson lived in thousands of hearts as the wild-eyed boy crouching in a deserted quarry and staring, long and incredulously, at the stone on which he had scratched the words ‘Byron is dead’. Film! Pure film! Try as he would, Froulish never succeeded in rivalling the Hollywood-sense of his idols. And even if he had descended to actual plagiarism it would, he knew, have been useless. Whose name could he scratch on a stone? The only famous author to die at a suitable time for such a demonstration was Rudyard Kipling, and he was sure it would be quite out of keeping for him to be found staring, wild with misery, at the words ‘Kipling is dead’. His friends would simply have laughed at him, the contemptuous and barely tolerant laugh that Tennyson probably never heard in all his life.