Michael’s consciousness of the sharp division in the college between two broad sections prevented him from retiring into seclusion. He continued to play Rugby football almost entirely in order to hear with a delighted irony the comments of the “bad men” on the “bloods.” Yet many of these “bad men” he rather liked, and he would often defend them to his critical young contemporaries, although on the “bad men” of his own year he was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was content in this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones, the trend of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of his outlook by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college. Even Alan he seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it seemed to him essential to move cautiously and always under the protection of numbers. These freshmen in their first term found a curious satisfaction in numbers. When they lunched together, they lunched in eights and twelves; when they dined out of college, as they sometimes did, at the Clarendon or the Mitre or the Queen’s, they gathered in the lodge almost in the dimensions of a school-treat. “Why do we always go about in such quantity?” Michael once asked Wedderburn. “What else can we do?” answered Wedderburn. “We must subject each other to—I mean—we haven’t got any clubs yet. We’re bound to stick together.” “Well, I’m getting rather fed up with it,” said Michael. “I feel more like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take coffee and tea in great masses of people. I’m bored to tears by half the men I go about with, and I’m sure they’re bored to tears with me. We don’t talk about anything but each other’s schools and whether A is a better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it’s true that D isn’t really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books; and every other evening about twelve people come and read them over each other’s shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette ash off the pictures. And when they’ve all read the story of the nightingale in the Decameron, they sit up till one o’clock discussing who of our year is most likely to be elected president of the J. C. R. four years from now.” But for all Michael’s grumbling through that first term he was beginning to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at Oxford which in the years to come he would remember. There was Wedderburn himself whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and episcopal voice masked a butterfly of a temperament that flitted from flower to flower of artistic experiment or danced attendance upon freshmen, the honey of whose future fame he seemed always able to probe.