“Why do we always go about in such quantity?” Michael once asked Wedderburn.
“What else can we do?” answered Wedderburn. “We must subject each other to—I mean—we haven’t got any clubs yet. We’re bound to stick together.”
“Well, I’m getting rather fed up with it,” said Michael. “I feel more like a tourist than a Varsity man. Every day we lunch and dine and take coffee and tea in great masses of people. I’m bored to tears by half the men I go about with, and I’m sure they’re bored to tears with me. We don’t talk about anything but each other’s schools and whether A is a better chap than B, or whether C is a gentleman and if it’s true that D isn’t really. I bought for my own pleasure some rather decent books; and every other evening about twelve people come and read them over each other’s shoulders, while I spend my whole time blowing cigarette ash off the pictures. And when they’ve all read the story of the nightingale in the Decameron, they sit up till one o’clock discussing who of our year is most likely to be elected president of the J. C. R. four years from now.”
But for all Michael’s grumbling through that first term he was beginning to perceive the blurred outlines of an intimate society at Oxford which in the years to come he would remember. There was Wedderburn himself whose square-headed solidity of demeanor and episcopal voice masked a butterfly of a temperament that flitted from flower to flower of artistic experiment or danced attendance upon freshmen, the honey of whose future fame he seemed always able to probe.
“I wonder if you really are the old snob you try to make yourself,” said Michael. “And yet I don’t think it is snobbishness. I believe it’s a form of collecting. It’s a throw back to primitive life in a private school. One day in your fourth year you’ll give a dinner party for about twelve bloods and I shall come too and remind you just when and how and where you picked them all up before their value was perfectly obvious. Partly of course it’s due to being at Eton where you had nothing to do but observe social distinction in the making and talk about Burne-Jones to your tutor.”
“My dear fellow,” said Wedderburn deeply, “I have these people up to my rooms because I like them.”
“But it is convenient always to like the right people,” Michael argued. “There are lots of others just as pleasant whom you don’t like. For instance, Avery——”
“Avery!” Wedderburn snorted.
“He’s not likely ever to be captain of the ‘Varsity Eleven,” said Michael. “But he’s amusing, and he can talk about books.”
“Patronizing ass,” Wedderburn growled.