Next, Martin found a penny paper called _The University_ and eagerly glanced through it to discover the quality of Oxford journalism. There were jokes about Socialists with red ties and there was an open letter to the varsity heavy-weight boxer. It began, 'Dear Chuckles,' and ended with best wishes for 'the dear little girl who will some day take the ring with you.' The reader was not even spared the allusion to the possible appearance of 'Chucklets.' "My god!" said Martin. He began to wonder whether he hadn't made a mistake in refusing to go to Cambridge. The room was depressing, so he put on his overcoat and walked out into the rain: he went down St Olde's to the river. In those days horse-drawn trams still rattled slowly through the streets, making a feeble pretence of antiquity. It angered Martin that in this town, with its new yellow banks and new college buildings, such hypocrisy should go on and that people should confuse the relics of medieval squalor with the works of medieval beauty. He came from a clean town of the hills, and the clinging dirt and the sordid grime and meanness of St Ebbs seemed haunting and insistent. Before Tom Tower and the spacious splendour of Christ Church there was a common slum; he had never pictured Oxford a place of slums. The Thames, too, had been in flood for two or three weeks, and in the playing-fields across the river goal-posts stood up amid acres of water, gauntly desolate. As he passed out along the Abingdon Road he found meadows where the floods had receded and left the grass rotten and stinking. The straggling squalor of Oxford's edge only served to increase his despair: he had expected to find a city with dreaming spires, and so far he had found merely a slum, with yellow gasworks. Only now and then did he catch a glimpse which charmed him. As he turned back and climbed the hill to Carfax he began to loathe the place. But it must be remembered that he had had an inadequate lunch and was under the shadow of an exam. On returning to Snutch's rooms he found that the fire had almost gone out. With the aid of _The University_ he managed to create a fitful gleam, but it gave no heat. Someone was moving about in the rooms opposite, another scholarship candidate presumably, a rival--damn him! Martin began to think about tea: he did not know what to do and his scout was not coming till six. Ultimately he went out to the Cadena Cafe: it was full of young women from North Oxford who sat in mackintoshes, feeding with desperate gaiety.