I saw as much as I could of Cæsar during the weeks that followed. His mental processes interested me hugely. He has an enviable faculty of concentrating upon the job in hand to the complete exclusion of everything outside. He forgot Oxford in the Service, and now seemed to have almost forgotten the Service in his return to Oxford, and to what he calls civilisation. He was greatly taken up with the design for his wooden leg. I met him after his first visit to Roehampton to be measured, and found him bubbling over with enthusiasm. “Such legs and arms!” cried he. “They are almost better than meat and bone ones. I saw a Tommy with a shorter stump than mine jumping hurdles and learning to kick. He was a professional footballer once. Another with a wooden arm could write and even draw. In a month or two’s time, when my stump is healed solid and I have learnt the tricks of my new leg, it will be a great sport exercising it and trying to find out what it can’t do. A new interest in life.” “You seem rather to like having a leg blown off,” I said, wondering. He is extraordinarily exuberant. I looked for depression after a month in hospital, but looked in vain. He builds up a future with as much zest as a youthful architect executes his first commission. The First in Greats is “off”; Cæsar says that he has not time to bother about such things. “I shall read History and modern French and Russian literature. History will do for my Final Schools, and Literature for my play. I shall learn Russian. Then when I have taken my degree I shall go in for the Foreign Office. My wooden leg will actually help me to a nomination, and the exam. is nothing. It’s not a bad idea; I thought of it last night.” “You don’t take long over a decision,” I remarked. “I never did,” said he calmly. When he returned to Oxford early in November he urged me to pay him a visit. I was in London a week or two later and having twenty-four hours to spare ran up to Oxford, established myself at the Clarendon, and summoned Cæsar to dine with me. All through the meal wonder grew upon me. For my very charming guest was an undergraduate in his fourth year, bearing no trace of having been anything else. We talked of Balzac, Anatole France, and Turgeniev. I listened politely to Cæsar’s views upon German and Russian Church music. I learned that the scarcity of Turkish cigarettes was causing him distress, that his rooms were delightful, and that Oxford was a desert swept clear of his old friends. The war was never once referred to. His conversation abounded in slang with which I was not familiar—I come from the other shop. It was an insufferable evening, and I saw Cæsar hobble away upon his crutches with positive relief. He could use his leg a little, but the stump was still rather sore. That hobble was the one natural and human thing about him.