An hour later he was dining in the Masters' Common-Room. He would have avoided the ordeal but for the unwritten law which ordained that even the housemasters should be present on the first night of term. Not that there was anything ceremonial about the proceedings. Nothing happened that did not always happen, except the handshaking and the disposition to talk more volubly than usual. Potter arched his long mottled neck in between each pair of diners in exactly the same manner as heretofore; there was the same unchanged menu of vegetable soup, undercooked meat, and a very small tart on a very large plate. But to Speed it seemed indeed as if everything was changed. The room seemed different; seemed darker, gloomier, more chronically insufferable; Potter's sibilant, cat-like stealthiness took on a degree of sinisterness that made Speed long to fight him and knock him down, soup-plates and all; the food tasted reminiscently of all the vaguely uncomfortable things he had ever known. But it was in the faces of the men around him that he detected the greatest change of all. He thought they were all hating him. He caught their eyes glancing upon him malevolently; he thought that when they spoke to him it was with some subtle desire to insult him; he thought also, that when they were silent it was because they were ignoring him deliberately. The mild distaste he had had for some of them, right from the time of first meeting, now flamed up into the most virulent and venomous of hatreds. And even Clanwell, whom he had always liked exceedingly, he suspected ever so slightly at first, though in a little while he liked him as much as ever, and more perhaps, because he liked the others so little. Pritchard he detested. Pritchard enquired about his holiday, how and where he had spent it, and whether he had had a good time; also if Mrs. Speed were quite well, and how had she liked the visit to Beachings Over. Somehow, the news had spread that he had taken Helen to spend Christmas at his parents' house. He wondered in what way, but felt too angry to enquire. Pritchard's questions stung him to silent, bottled-up fury; he answered in monosyllables. "Friend Speed has the air of a thoughtful man," remarked Ransome in his oblique, half-sarcastic way. And Speed smiled at this, not because it amused him at all, but because Ransome possessed personality which submerged to some extent his own. Finally, when Clanwell asked him up to coffee he declined, courteously, but with a touch of unboyish reserve which he had never previously exhibited in his relations with Clanwell. "I've got such a lot of work at Lavery's," he pleaded. "Another night, Clanwell...."