Down one wall, a row of black frocks and white aprons at attention; at the top of the room, High Table beginning to fill up: black garments, grey, close-brushed intellectual heads, serious thin faces looking down the room, one young one, drooping a little: piles of chestnut hair and a white Peter Pan collar. Crowds of dresses of all colours, shapes and sizes, all running about briskly, knowing where to go; a sea of faces bobbing and turning, chattering, bright-eyed, nodding and laughing to other faces, sure of themselves. ‘Margaret, come and sit here ... here ... here! Next to me! Sylvia, next to me.... Is there a place for Sylvia?...’ ‘I am lost, lost, abandoned, alone, lost,’ thought Judith wildly and pounced for the nearest chair and clung to it. She was between two girls who stared at her, then looked away again. She bowed her head: the old terror of faces engulfed her. There fell a silence. A voice like a bell went through the room, calling: _Benedictus, benedicat_. And then came a roar,--a scraping, an immense yelling that rose to the ceiling and there rolled, broke, swelled again without pause. Beneath its volumes she felt herself lost again; but nobody else appeared to have noticed it. ‘Can I pass you the salt?’ said her neighbour. ‘After you,’ said Judith earnestly. ‘Thanks.’ The conversation swirled on around her. ‘Who d’you think’s engaged? Three guesses.... Let’s look at the tombstone. Soup....... how classically simple ... just soup.... Take a hundred dirty dishcloths, soak them in hot water, add a few onions.... Dorothy’s bobbed her hair. It suits her. It doesn’t suit her.... My dear, who _is_ that girl next to you?... I’ve done six hours every day this vac.... May you be forgiven.... Well anyway, four regularly.... I’m going to _work_ this term, seven hours solid, no dances.... I’ve got to ... you should have heard the jawing I got from Miss Marsh because I only got a third in Part I.... Well I think that was jolly good: I shall think myself jolly lucky if I get the same.... Old Marsh has lost every human instinct.... D’you know Sibyl Jones has done ten hours every day for two months?... She’s _bound_ to collapse.... Third years ought to be more sensible at their age.... I _say_, I _do_ believe Miss Ingram’s dyed her hair. I’m _sure_ it’s a different colour.... D’you suppose she’s in _love_?... I knew a girl at Oxford who overworked most fearfully, and she woke up one morning and every hair on her head had come off and was lying on the pillow beside her, looking like a nasty practical joke. Rather a jar, wasn’t it? But she took to a wig, my dears, a flaxen waved wig and it was such an improvement that she left off her glasses and became quite flighty and took to powdering her nose as well, so it was a blessing in disguise; and then her Maths coach proposed to her and they got married, and all I wonder is whether he got a shock or whether she’d warned him, because I s’pose she takes it off