When it was all over he hurried down to Devonshire, leaving Lawrence to forty-eight hours of continuous intoxication. Freda would still be there. But, to his fury, he discovered that she had gone to Paris with Margaret. He sulked obviously, and hated the whole world: life and letters had tended to leave his nerves raw and anything stung him. Finally he went to join Rendell and Lawrence in Belgium, and there, with Memling and Bock and conversation, he forgot his woes. The exam results came to them at Rochefort, rich in grottoes, that notable town of the Ardennes. Rendell had taken a first, Martin a second, and Lawrence a third. Martin had entertained fears of a third and Lawrence of a fourth, so they agreed that things have been worse. "Anyhow," said Martin, as they went in search of tea and _gateaux_, "that's an end of those infernal classics." Which was both an error on his part--for in Greats, as he later on discovered, one deals mainly with translation--and a commentary on the plain man's attitude to the poets and orators by the time that he has been taught all about them. IV The summer term was a joyous interlude. Martin and Lawrence had nothing to do but play tennis or regard the world from a punt, and an early summer encouraged these methods of killing time. Rendell was cajoled by Petworth into entering for the Hertford scholarship, which involved some attention to the Latin language. While Martin read novels Rendell was perusing some of the worst poetry that the world has ever produced, it being the habit of the examiners to select passages from the frigid obscurity of Silver Latin. "There's your classical education," shouted Lawrence contemptuously. "Silius Italicus and drivel about Etna and its siphons." Rendell had to admit that, taken as a whole, Latin literature made a poor show. "There's Lucretius and Catullus," he said. "They're all right," said Lawrence. "But who else is there? Virgil, the Victorian before his time. The cave scene, so refined and all that. Better than old Arthur from the barge. Virgil the most blatant pirate and lifter of literary goods that ever made a name. Virgil who couldn't even translate the originals right and showed himself to be a fool as well as a knave. If we're going to have thieves, let's have them competent. Virgil! Ugh!" Lawrence always spoke like this about Virgil: the subject gave him eloquence, and the others had long ago ceased to argue with him on this theme. To withstand his river of rhetoric was like trying to make a match-box float up-stream.