Michael, Grainger and Lonsdale sighed very movingly, and tried to look like martyrs, but they greatly enjoyed telling what had happened to the other freshmen and several second-year men. It was told, too, in a manner of elaborate nonchalance with many vows to do the same to-morrow.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST TERM
His first term at Oxford was for Michael less obviously a period of discovery than from his pre-figurative dreams he had expected. He had certainly pictured himself in the midst of a society more intellectually varied than that in which he found himself; and all that first term became in retrospect merely a barren noisy time from which somehow after numberless tentative adjustments and developments emerged a clear view of his own relation to the college, and more particularly to his own “year.” These trials of personality were conducted with all the help that sensitiveness could render him. But this sensitiveness when it had registered finely and accurately a few hazardous impressions was often sharp as a nettle in its action, so sharp indeed sometimes that he felt inclined to withdraw from social encounters into a solitude of books. Probably Michael would have become a recluse, if he had not decided on the impulse of the moment to put down his name for Rugby football. He was fairly successful in the first match, and afterward Carben, the secretary of the college club, invited him to tea. This insignificant courtesy gave Michael a considerable amount of pleasure, inasmuch as it was the first occasion on which he had been invited to his rooms by a second-year man. With Carben he found about half a dozen other seniors and a couple of freshmen whom he did not remember to have noticed before; and the warm room, whose murmurous tinkle was suddenly hushed as he entered, affected him with a glowing hospitality.
Michael had found it so immediately easy to talk that when Carben made a general observation on the row of Sunday night’s celebration, Michael proclaimed enthusiastically the excellence of the bonfire.
“Were you in that gang?” Carben asked in a tone of contemptuous surprise.
“I was fined,” Michael announced, trying to quench the note of exultation in deference to the hostility he instinctively felt he was creating.
“I say,” Carben sneered, “so at last one of the ‘bloods’ is going to condescend to play Rugger. Jonah,” he called to the captain of the Fifteen who was lolling in muscular grandeur at the other end of the room, “we’ve got a college blood playing three-quarter for us.”
“Good work,” said Jones, with a toast-encumbered laugh. “Where is he?”
Carben pointed to Michael who blushed rather angrily.