After I had been to my rooms and had a bath I went round to Oriel to see Fred, but he was not in his rooms, so I left a note to tell him that he must come to luncheon with me. Then I rushed back to St. Cuthbert's and went to hear Mr. Edwardes lecturing. I missed the beginning of the lecture, and I might just as well have stayed away altogether, for Mr. Edwardes asked me to speak to him at the end of it, though what he meant was that he was going to speak while I was to listen. Grave things were happening, at least I thought them grave, and Mr. Edwardes had nothing whatever to do with them. While he talked to me I was trying by a process of mental arithmetic to discover how much money I had to my credit in the bank; the voice which I heard seemed to me to belong to bygone ages, and I was so worried by actual and present facts that I could not screw up a vestige of interest in antiquities. I know that it was always my fate to arouse either the irony or the anger of my tutor, for to other men he was far more pleasant than he was to me, but I could not help thinking of him as representative of a system which could never influence me in the least. He soon discovered that I was paying no attention to him, and I suppose that I must have got most vigorously on his nerves, for he really became quite humanly angry, I must have been nearer to an understanding with him at that moment than I had ever been. But when his rage abated, his lips snapped and the thunderbolts ceased. He went on too long and became sarcastic again, as if ashamed of being properly angry, and I left him with the usual hopeless feeling that we should never understand each other. I went into the common room as I was crossing the quad, and before I had been there two minutes Dennison came in with Lambert and two or three other men of their set. No one else was in the room except Murray, who was reading, and absolutely refused to talk to me about Edwardes, so I turned over various papers until Dennison asked me if I did not think our eight was quite the most comically bad boat I had ever seen. "The whole college is going to the deuce," I answered. "You look as if you were up late last night, and have got a fair old head on this morning," Dennison declared. "I haven't been to bed at all, if you want to know," I said. "Going to the deuce with the rest of the college, well, you have the consolation of being quite the most amusing man in it." I think I was fool enough to say that I was not amusing. "Not consciously," Dennison replied, "but I get more fun from you than from anybody, and when you are in a serious mood you are the most comic man I know. He's delicious, isn't he, Lambert?" "If you can't see the funny side of our eight, you must be a madman," Lambert said to me. "We used to be head of the river, and now we can't row for sour apples," Dennison chuckled, "the thing's a perfect pantomime."