Martin was a great athlete. He was always rowing, always training; but once or twice he borrowed a motor-bicycle and came out to tea, when Judith and Jennifer gave combined tea-parties to young men. On these occasions his face was very red and he looked too big for the room. He was quite silent and stared with concentration at Judith and Jennifer alternately; and seemed not to take to his fellow guests. He was undoubtedly a heavy young man to have at a tea-party--a bad mixer. Jennifer’s jokes, oaths and sallies brought no gleam to his countenance, and Jennifer was bored with him. Impossible to convince her that Martin was not a dull young man. Martin dull?... God-like in form he dived from the raft and swam over the river, swiftly, with laughter, water and sun upon his face. He sat among them all and smoked his pipe, looking kindly and comforting. You could depend on his eyes solicitously watching, his smile inviting you to come in, when all the others, neither kindly nor comforting, had shut the door and gone away. He was the one to whom Mariella chattered at her ease and made little childish jokes, calling him ‘darlin’,’ looking at him with candour and affection, sometimes even with a glint of mischief, as if she were a girl like any other girl; as if that something never fell across her clear face and obscured it. He shared a bedroom with Roddy; had a little screen at home, so he said, which Roddy had decorated, and given to him; he came walking up garden-paths with Roddy laughing and talking at his side. In the darkness under the cherry-tree he bent his head and tried to speak, twisting his scrap of cherry, trembling with enchantment. He had been a thing to fly from, surprised, with beating heart. But when Jennifer said he was a dull young man, it was very difficult to argue with her; for it seemed almost as if, transplanted alone to this new world, he were indeed quite dull, rather ordinary. He came to tea three times. The last time Judith went with him down the stairs--his deliberate, assured masculine tread sounding significant, almost alarming in that house of flustered uneven foolish-sounding steps--and said good-night to him at the front door. Fumbling with the lamps of his motor-bicycle he said: ‘Why can’t one ever see you alone?’ ‘It’s not allowed, Martin. I can’t ask you to tea alone. And I can’t come to your rooms without a chaperon.’ ‘Oh, damn the chaperon. I shan’t ask you to tea at all. Can’t you break a footling rule for anybody you know as well as me?’ She said deprecatingly that it was impossible. ‘You mean you won’t.’ That was what she meant. It was not worth while to break rules for dull Martin. ‘Who’s that Jennifer person you’re always with?’ ‘A person I’m very fond of----’ She flared at his tone. ‘Never see you anywhere without her,’ he muttered. ‘Well you needn’t come to tea with me.’ ‘Oh, I shan’t come again.’ ‘I shan’t ask you.’