“Shall I have a shot?” suggested Lonsdale.
“It’s a most devilish good game,” Michael earnestly avowed.
“Tommy,” Lonsdale shouted, “I’m going to be a Rugger rough myself.”
“I shall sconce you, young Lonsdale, if you make such a row,” said Wedderburn severely.
“My god, Wedders, you are a prize ass,” chuckled the offender.
Wedderburn whispered to the scout near him.
“Have you sconced me?” Lonsdale demanded.
The head of the table nodded.
Lonsdale was put to much trouble and expense to avenge his half-crown. Finally with great care he took down all the pictures in Wedderburn’s room and hung in their places gaudy texts. Also for the plaster Venus of Milo he caused to be made a miniature chest-protector. It was all very foolish, but it afforded exquisite entertainment to Lonsdale and his auxiliaries, especially when in the lodge they beheld Wedderburn’s return from a dinner out of college, and when presently they visited him in his room to enjoy his displeasure.
Michael’s consciousness of the sharp division in the college between two broad sections prevented him from retiring into seclusion. He continued to play Rugby football almost entirely in order to hear with a delighted irony the comments of the “bad men” on the “bloods.” Yet many of these “bad men” he rather liked, and he would often defend them to his critical young contemporaries, although on the “bad men” of his own year he was as hard as the rest of the social leaders. He was content in this first term to follow loyally, with other heedless ones, the trend of the moment. He made few attempts to enlarge the field of his outlook by cultivating acquaintanceship outside his own college. Even Alan he seldom visited, since in these early days of Oxford it seemed to him essential to move cautiously and always under the protection of numbers. These freshmen in their first term found a curious satisfaction in numbers. When they lunched together, they lunched in eights and twelves; when they dined out of college, as they sometimes did, at the Clarendon or the Mitre or the Queen’s, they gathered in the lodge almost in the dimensions of a school-treat.