Sam caught the infection, too, but hardly as a game. He hung on Peter’s judgment with a deep anxiety, watched Peter flush and shuffle in his chair, saw him take snuff nervously, trembled at the moment when Peter seemed about to interrupt, sighed with relief when Peter sat back silently again and waited feverishly for the chairman’s speech. There would probably have been little doubt about Peter’s verdict had Adams been an ordinary Concentric, lecturer and a member of the Society. But he was neither, and was there by invitation. And he was not only of Oxford, Peter’s University, but brilliantly of Oxford, of Balliol, with academic honours thick upon him. If Peter thought, as Adams spoke, that he ought to call him to order, he remembered that Adams was a Double First, and desisted. He couldn’t be a hypocrite--because he had won the Ireland. He was terribly in earnest now--because he had won the Greek Verse Prize. He was single-minded, chivalrous, braving the misapprehension of the scurrilous, open and honest--because he was a Fellow of Balliol. It did not matter to Peter that Adams’ father was the richest parishioner in St. Mary’s; it mattered even less that Adams was exquisitely dressed in exactly the shade of grey appropriate to an ardent crusader. (“Look at his damned clothes,” Reed had whispered to Stewart. “Hasn’t he thought it out?” He had: his clothes were chaste if his lecture wasn’t.) But scholarship did matter to Peter, whose other name was Charity, and once he had decided that Gerald was sincere, that all he said was subordinate to and justified by high purpose, he was generous, and the more generous because he had doubted. “The subject of Mr. Adams’ lecture,” he said, “is like nettles: if it is not handled boldly, it stings. I have nothing but praise for the courage, the down rightness, the earnestness of his treatment of this distressing evil. I think that we have all been deeply stirred by his instances of man’s inhumanity to women. As a churchman I feel a special responsibility and, may I say, a special gratitude to Mr. Adams for his study of this subject. Medicine, as we all know, has its martyrs, its research workers who sacrifice themselves for the health of their fellowmen. Mr. Adams, who has examined this social sore so thoroughly, at what cost in pain to himself only the most sensitive amongst us can guess, deserves to be ranked with the martyrs of science....” And so on, doubly handsome because he felt ashamed of himself for doubting Gerald’s honesty, and made amends. Adams had won his game, hands down. He thought the old boy gloriously funny and he thought Sam Branstone, who rose when Peter sat down, funnier still. Sam believed in striking while the iron was hot: he didn’t want Peter to have the opportunity of changing his mind when he came to think things over coolly.