“I didn’t know him—exactly,” said Michael, “but—in fact—we thought him rather a tick.” “Thanks very much and all that,” said Jones. “He was a friend of mine, but don’t apologize.” There was a general laugh at Michael’s expense from which Carben’s guffaw survived. “Jonah was never one for moving in the best society,” he said with an implication in his tone that the best society was something positively contemptible. Michael retired from the conversation and sat silent, counting with cold dislike the constellated pimples on Carben’s face. Meanwhile the others exercised their scornful wit upon the “bloods” of the college. “Did you hear about Fitzroy and Gingold?” Carben indignantly demanded. “Gingold was tubbing yesterday and Fitzroy was coaching. ‘Can’t you keep your fat little paunch down? I don’t want to look at it,’ said Fitzroy. That’s pretty thick from a second-year man to a third-year man in front of a lot of freshers. Gingold’s going to jack rowing, and he’s quite right.” “Quite right,” a chorus echoed. Michael remembered Fitzroy very blithely intoxicated at the J. C. R.; he remembered, too, that Fitzroy had drunk his health. This explosion of wrath at the insult offered to Gingold’s dignity irritated Michael. He felt sure that Gingold had a fat little paunch and that he thoroughly deserved to be told to keep it out of sight. Gingold was probably as offensive as Jones and Carben. “These rowing bloods think they’ve bought the college,” somebody was wisely propounding. “We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn’t we?” Michael inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed rebuke. “Well, I think it would be a d’d good thing, if we dropped six places,” Carben affirmed. How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary, and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with a dismal genteelness. “Oh, by the way, before you go,” said Carben, “you’d better let me put your name down for the Ugger.” “The what?” Michael asked, with a faint insolence. “The Union.” Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the sponsorship of Carben. “I don’t think I’ll join this term.” He ran down the stairs from Carben’s rooms and stood for a moment apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St. Mary’s tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook off the memory of Carben’s tea-party as if he had alighted from a crowded Sunday train and plunged immediately into deep country. In hall that night Lonsdale asked Michael what he had been doing, and was greatly amused by his information, so much amused that he called along the table to Grainger: “I say, Tommy, do you know we’ve got a Rugger rough with us?” Several people murmured in surprise. “I say, have you really been playing Rugger?”