My first dinner in hall was not a pleasant experience. The senior men came up a day after us, and most freshers, until they settle down, seem to spend their time in waiting for somebody else to say something. That dinner really made me feel most gloomy; things seemed to have been turned upside down, and in the process I felt as if I had fallen with a thud to the bottom. There were two or three freshers from Cliborough to whom I had scarcely spoken during my last two years at school, and these fellows all sat together and enjoyed themselves, while I counted for nothing whatever. I began to learn the lesson that being in the Cliborough XI. and XV. was not a free passport to glory. The man opposite to me looked as if he had never heard of W. G. Grace, and when I tried to speak to the fellow on my right about the Australians, he thought that I was talking about any ordinary Australian, and had no notion that I meant the cricket team which had been over in the summer. He was quite nice about it, I must admit, and when he found out what I was driving at, said: "I am afraid I don't know much about cricket; I have been over in Germany the last two or three months, trying to get hold of the language. I want to read Schiller and those other people in the original." He did not suit me at all, and as I had not the courage to give myself away by asking the names of the other people our conversation dropped. I was, in fact, dead off colour, and the sight of those three Cliborough fellows almost took away my appetite. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that I had been in the habit of thinking a lot of myself at Cliborough, and in self-defence I must add that I do not see how a public school can prosper unless some of the fellows stick together and try to make things go on properly. Any "side" I may have had was certainly unconscious, but I haven't an idea whether that is the worst or the best kind. I know that I should have felt like having a fit if any one had told me that I was conceited, and apart from that I don't know anything about it, except, as I have said, that I was angry that these fellows did not seem to remember that I had been at Cliborough. I told myself that they had lost their sense of proportion, which was a phrase my father used about any one who argued with him; and I also said vehemently that they were worms; but unless you are quite sure of it, and can get some one to agree with you, there is not much satisfaction to be got from calling people worms.