When I got back to my rooms I found a letter from my uncle. He was a bishop, and there had been trouble between us when I was a small boy at Cliborough; he had made jokes about me which I did not bear in silence. But he had spent a month of the summer holidays with us, and had told my mother that I had greatly improved; I thought the same thing about him, so we got on together very well. I may as well say at once that I had laid siege to the bishop. Instead of waiting for him to go for me I went for him, and my mother said that I had discovered the boy in the bishop. If he was idle I employed him, and on his last day with us I finished off by making one hundred and thirty-six against him at stump cricket. When he went away I had changed my opinion of him, but my father was annoyed that he could behave like a boy when it was time for me to forget that I was one. "You are as silly as the bishop," became one of my father's favourite remarks, until my mother asked him to think of something which was not quite so rude.
The bishop had really been splendid while he was staying with us, because Nina, having arrived at the age of eighteen, was very difficult to please. Some man in my brother's regiment had been down and said that her pug was an angel, and I being unable to reach such heights as that was compared to my disadvantage with this man. I am nearly sure, too, that she wanted to flirt with Fred, quite regardless of the fact that he was no use at flirting, and I should have had something to say if he had been. In a short year she had changed most dreadfully, and was no longer satisfied with being liked very much. She was a puzzle to me, and had it not been for the bishop, who smoothed things over, I should probably have worried her far more than I did.
His letter did not contain one word of cant; he just wished me good luck, and told me to write to him whenever I felt that he could be of use to me. A less sensible man might have preached to me and talked about the "threshold of a career"; but, thank goodness, he knew what I wanted, and that if I had not made up my mind to let Oxford do something for me, I was hopeless from the start.
CHAPTER II
INTERVIEWS
I soon found out that Jack Ward was of a most friendly disposition, for he came over to my rooms before ten o'clock the following morning and bounced in with an air of having known me all my life. At the moment I was talking to a man called Murray, whose acquaintance I had made an hour before. My introduction to Murray could hardly be called formal; he lived in the next rooms to me and at precisely the same time each of us had poked our heads into the passage and shouted for our scout. We then looked at each other and laughed, and the deed was done. I wish that I could have made all my friends at Oxford as easily; it would have saved so much time.
Murray was going as Ward came in, and they nodded and said "Good-morning" in the way men do when they don't altogether love one another.
"You seem to know everybody," I said, without much reason, as soon as Murray had disappeared.
"I can't well help knowing that fellow, considering that he was at Wellingham with me for five years."