Standing there, he enclosed, he enfolded them all in his hatred—the discreet funny dons, telling legends about Proust; the sincere young neurotics, writing each other ten-page notes explaining their conduct at a last night’s tiff; the hearties, divided between shop-girls, poker and the C.U.I.C.C.U.; the College servants, so oily in their deference to all these rich young ninnies; the bed-makers, thievish gossipy old hags, who drank as much of their gentlemen’s whisky as they dared, and stank so that you could hardly put your nose inside their broom-cupboards after they had gone. And if, at that moment, Eric could have given the order, the Round Church and the Hall of Trinity and King’s Chapel and Corpus Library and dozens of other world-famed architectural lumber-rooms of priceless venerable rubbish would have gone up sky-high with enormous charges of dynamite, and the silk-jumpered young gentlemen and dear old professors been driven out of their well-furnished academic hotels at the point of the bayonet. And Cambridge would have returned to its proper status as a small market-town, inhabited by commercial travellers, auctioneers, cattle-dealers, out-of-work jockeys, and other bar-flies—a soured, defeated tribe, given over to betting and drink, in the middle of this swamp of a country, with rheumatics and damaged lungs. And good riddance, Eric thought.

Well, anyhow, whether I go or not—he knows what I think, Eric reflected. He’d been pretty frank in London last Vac. And Maurice had actually seemed impressed. Yes, Eric, I quite understand. No, I think you’re absolutely right. Thanks awfully for telling me.

From anybody else it’d be a deliberate insult. But Maurice never insulted anybody in his life. He couldn’t. He was merely being, as usual, quite thoughtless, like a child.

And how sick I am of children, Eric thought. Everybody up here is a child—a nice, jolly, overgrown boy. All of them artless and kittenish and naïve. Maurice does it better than the others. He’s more genuine. But I’m sick of the whole push.

Altogether, that visit to London last Vac. had been a most miserable failure. Eric had looked forward to it all through last term. It was to be an escape from Chapel Bridge, from the whole situation at the Hall. He was going to get back into the old Gatesley atmosphere.

He didn’t. Aunt Mary’s house in the mews seemed to have nothing whatever in common with her other home. And even the Ramsbothams, even Billy Hawkes, seemed preferable to Aunt Mary’s new strident friends in their large black hats. Aunt Mary was the same, of course. And so was Anne. But they spoke a new language. They seemed less remarkable; less unique. They had lost power.

Only Maurice, Eric felt, hadn’t become, as he put it to himself, a Londoner. Maurice had not suffered from transplantation. And that was why it had seemed worth while saying what he had. He’d been careful, of course, to mention no names. But surely not even Maurice could be so dense—no, there was no way round it, Maurice must have known exactly whom Eric meant.