Digby Gisbourne took the remark in his stride. “Not at all. I was born in London, as a matter of fact, to a London mother of French Huguenot extraction. My father is, indeed, of Yorkshire stock—you are aware of the village of that name?—but I have spent little time north of the river Trent and feel no attachment to the place. Dark it is, I observe, but true and tender?” He shook his head. “Tennyson confuses his epithets, I fear . . . He should have used the words ‘fierce and fickle’ from the line above.”

Fanshawe, restive, broke in. “Glad to hear it! There’s none like a Yorkshireman for boring a party with his mawkish attachment to his roots . . . unless it be a Scotsman! Take care, Mr. Coward, that you don’t provoke Rendlesham into waxing lyrical over Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, or Sackville into vowing his eternal fealty to Much Snoring, Norfolk. Society has pushed forward its horizons with the railway and the telephone. Matured. We are all citizens of the wide world these days. Though we are all—if only occasionally—tempted to regress into cosy collegiate loyalty by the wearing of a tie of doubtful taste and lurid colour. All of us here are members of this college. St. Jude’s,” Fanshawe explained. And added slyly: “You, Mr. Coward”—a finger whisked out in the direction of Dickie’s tie—“I note, are also a Cambridge, er . . . man?”

More titters. Comments were passed behind hands which flicked over mouths and back again with the speed of a camera shutter.

So! Hostility was at last unsheathed from the scabbard of courtesy. It slid out to the hiss of sneers, gleamed with the contempt of mocking stares. Dickie would have relished hitting them with a few such overwrought phrases, but he judged it too soon to be throwing down a challenge.

At last, he’d understood. Bloody Edith! was his first thought. And stupid old Oily! Between you, you’ve made me look a first-rate dunderhead! The sly insinuations were surely indicating that he was sporting the colours of one of the women’s colleges. Hardly worn by the ladies since the Edwardian days of white blouses and cycling plus-fours, when it had been the fashion to copy men’s clothing styles, ties on women’s necks were a rare sight about town. He hadn’t recognised it. But his hosts, obsessed as they were with college protocol, clearly had. There were two colleges exclusively for women: Newnham and Girton. Which one? Could he remember the colours? Not with certainty. He swiftly calculated the odds, consulted his gut instinct and made his decision.