Mr. Tipham brought with him from Cleopas College, Cambridge, two more or less fixed ideas; first, that art consists in depicting disagreeable things in a disagreeable way, and, secondly, that life in the twentieth century is governed by two conflicting forces--convention, which is always wrong, and Nature, which is always right. This theory had carried him not only safely but brilliantly through his university career. He had secured a first in both parts of the Tripos; he had played a prominent part in the life of his own college and been quoted outside it; he had worn strange clothes, founded a literary society in which thought was made to perform queer antics in shackles of its own imposing, and he had invented a new savoury. His slightly tilted nose and full cheeks gave him an air of confidence which unfriendly critics described as conceit, while the long brown hair, drawn back over the temples and plastered down with fragrant oils, the orange tie and loose green jacket, proclaimed that he was one of those for whom art is not merely a hobby but an integral part of life. One glance at his face would have informed any ordinarily shrewd observer that, in approaching new problems and unfamiliar ground, Mr. Tipham would not suffer from diffidence. The late Victorians might have called him untidy and even unwashed; but at no period in English history would he have been branded as modest. It was inevitable that Mr. Tipham should fall foul of the Lanchester tradition. He would have fallen foul of any tradition. But he chose to defy it in most unnecessary and offensive ways. He smoked as he walked down to school from his lodgings, he refused even a perfunctory homage to the claims of age and seniority, and the scarf that he wore almost permanently round his throat (for Mr. Tipham was an indoor man and sensitive to cold and damp) was a combination of colours--the colours of the Brainstorm Club--that shocked the moral sense of Chiltern by its unblushing æstheticism. Mr. Chowdler took a violent dislike to him at their first meeting, and missed no opportunity of trying to put him down by heavy sarcasm. But Mr. Tipham was an unsatisfactory butt; and when attacked he had a way of raising his eyebrows and inquiring “How so?” in a bored and superior tone, which goaded Mr. Chowdler to frenzy. It was, indeed, soon evident that, if the serious purpose of Mr. Tipham’s life was to teach the boys, his recreation consisted in shocking the masters. To all the things that they held sacred, the very things that ought to have impressed him most, he applied the same disparaging term, “mid-Victorian” or “bourgeois.” Even the weekly dinner in Common Room, with its quaint ceremonial and unique endowment, did not escape the damning epithet. Before a fortnight had elapsed, everybody went about saying that that fellow Tipham was impossible.