Here and there, in preparing Alfred’s MSS. for the press, we have detected discrepancies which, had he lived, he might have adjusted, subtle touches which he might have amplified, luxuriances which he might have pruned. In respect to his memory, however, we have let these stand. If we have done wrong, we look for pardon from those who remember that, where an old and very deep friendship is concerned, the task of literary execution is no easy one. H. M. R. M. BOOK I VORTEX THE OXFORD CIRCUS CHAPTER I INTROIT “But I _must_ have a hansom!” Behind the voice there were centuries of the best breeding, but the tone was perhaps a trifle querulous. From the crowded yard of the Oxford railway station there came no answer save the hoarse, insistent cries of porters and the importunate scuffling of cab-touts. “Taxi, sir?” “’ere y’are, sir. Taxi, sir?” But Gaveston ffoulis knew his own mind. “No,” he insisted, gazing with something like surprise round the cab-ranks. “I _must_ have a hansom.” “None ’ere, sir,” growled a surly-eyed taxi-driver. “Then drive to the centre of the city,” ordered the young man, without hesitation, “and fetch me one--instantly!” Instinctively the driver touched his cap. With a click the flag of his meter fell in symbolic surrender to this new arrival, and the motor, a throbbing anachronism, sped fussily away towards those rotund domes and soaring spires, whence, through the mellow streaming of October sunlight, came already the distant bombilation of crowding, multisonant bells.… All impatience, Gaveston waited there for his chosen conveyance, and glanced coldly at the unimaginative battalions of undergraduates around him, who, callous to all appropriacy, were noisily flinging themselves and their golf-clubs into humdrum taxicabs. How pitiful, and how plebeian, was their lack of sensibility! To enter Oxford--the Oxford of Bacon and Pater, of Newman and Mackenzie--in these mechanical monstrosities! Rather than that, he had gone afoot. “I’d as soon enter Paradise on stilts!” he reflected, and smiled at his witty conceit.… And the smile had not faded from his full, attractive lips, when the bespoken hansom scampered up, guided by the taxi. Ordering the latter to collect his multitudinous luggage, he engaged the former to drive him to his destination. “Wallace!” he cried, and leapt lightly into the graceful equipage.