On reading the letter announcing their plans Martin groaned in the spirit. It wasn't, of course it wasn't, that he did not want to see Freda. Did he not write to her as eagerly as ever? Did she not answer? But Eights Week of all times!
Martin was sufficiently a lover of Oxford, summery Oxford of the still water-ways, to loathe and despise Eights Week, that Whitsuntide holiday of the wealthy, when the city is invaded by a host of rich trippers, whose tripping has not even the justification of beer-bottles and hearty bestiality. He did not wish to eat salmon mayonnaise, to drink champagne cup, to propel, in faultless flannels, a punt among a solid mass of punts, to go for picnics where all London was revelling. His choice would have been to launch a vessel on the upper river, to find some tranquil backwater past Eynsham, with a canopy of willow and the scene of flowering meadows; or else to make use of deserted tennis courts and to enjoy things properly. Now they were going to break in upon him: and indeed another idle vacation had left him work enough to do. They had not come when he was a fresher and such things were allowable, and the Berrisfords knew Oxford well. Presumably they desired to show Freda the city and its ways. But why, oh why, in Eights Week? It wasn't like the Berrisfords.
They arrived duly and lived in state at the Mitre: they mingled with the crowds, tramped the colleges, and demanded to have things pointed out to them. Mary Brodrick said all the right things. Martin shuddered as the phrases came out in turn:
"Can we see the kitchens?" (at Christ Church).
"Where are the Prince's rooms?" (at Magdalen).
"Isn't this the clever college?" (at Balliol).
It was a gloomy ceremony.
There was Freda. And she ... well, he had to admit that she didn't harmonise with this world of fine raiment and expensive bean-feasts. The Freda who glittered in the punt, the Freda clothed sumptuously at her uncle's expense was undeniably different from the insignificant wisp of a girl in plain blue coat and skirt who had hurried out of the office at six and come to Martin for rest and comfort. To have explained his feelings accurately would have been an impossible task for Martin, but he could not put aside a vague sensation that Freda was wrongly placed in this world, that she was pre-eminently a martyr and a rebel, not a woman of leisure.
She did not even know what to say. There is a particular kind of speech appropriate to these occasions: it is neither flirtation nor conversation in the proper sense, but a discreet blend, a mixture as insipid as it is inevitable. It does not demand brains or wit, but a certain quality, a training. Mary Brodrick, with all her limitations, knew the game; she was jolly and made things go. Freda hung back or, when she came forward, made mistakes. Odd that Martin should have been angry with Freda for her inability to play a game which he himself despised. Yet it did pain him that she didn't "fit in."
As a strange word whose meaning has recently been discovered seems to the reader to occur on every page he reads, so Freda suddenly revealed to Martin in a hundred ways her incapacity for "fitting in." And it was to the society of countless Brodricks that Martin would have to take her.