“These rowing bloods think they’ve bought the college,” somebody was wisely propounding.
“We ought to go head of the river this year, oughtn’t we?” Michael inquired with as much innocence as he could muster to veil the armed rebuke.
“Well, I think it would be a d’d good thing, if we dropped six places,” Carben affirmed.
How many pimples there were, thought Michael, looking at the secretary, and he felt he must make some excuse to escape from this room whose atmosphere of envy and whose castrated damns were shrouding Oxford with a dismal genteelness.
“Oh, by the way, before you go,” said Carben, “you’d better let me put your name down for the Ugger.”
“The what?” Michael asked, with a faint insolence.
“The Union.”
Michael, occupied with the problem of adjustment, had no intention of committing himself so early to the Union and certainly not under the sponsorship of Carben.
“I don’t think I’ll join this term.”
He ran down the stairs from Carben’s rooms and stood for a moment apprehensively upon the lawn. Then sublime in the dusk he saw St. Mary’s tower and, refreshed by that image of an aspiration, he shook off the memory of Carben’s tea-party as if he had alighted from a crowded Sunday train and plunged immediately into deep country.