“I don’t know,” Alan would reply, and in his tone would somehow rest the implication that Michael should know better than to expect him to be aware of each individual in this very much subdivided college.
“Did you hear the hockey push broke the windows of the socker push in Peck?” asked one of the Christ Church hosts.
“No, really?” answered Alan indifferently.
After hall as they walked back to Meadows’, Michael tried to point out to him that the St. Mary’s method of dining in hall was superior to that of the House.
“The dinner itself is better,” Alan admitted. “But I hate your system of all getting up from table at the same time. It’s like school.”
“But if a guest comes to St. Mary’s he sits at his host’s regular table. He’s introduced to everybody. Why, Alan, I believe if you’d had another guest to-night, you wouldn’t even have introduced me to him. He and I would have had to drink coffee in your rooms like a couple of dummies.”
“Rot!” said Alan. “And whom could you have wanted to meet this evening? All the men at the guests’ table were absolute ticks.”
“I’ve never met a House man who didn’t think every other House man impossible outside the four people in his own set,” retorted Michael. “And yet, I suppose, you’ll say it’s the best college?”
“Of course,” Alan agreed.
Up in his rooms they pondered the long May day’s reluctant death, while the coffee-machine bubbled and fizzed and The Soul’s Awakening faintly kindled by the twilight was appropriately sentimental.