Eric held out his hand with affected emotion.
"That's uncommon good of you! I thought you'd want me to choose some one to live with me in your place."
"I wish you'd find somebody to go to the bar in my place," murmured Jack with a momentary return of his earlier gloom. "Can't you? The exams are quite easy for a man of your powerful intellect, and you only have to eat a few dinners and get called. I should live at Lashmar as the simple, old English country gentleman.... Hullo! we're late! You'll see about paying the fine, won't you?"
They crossed the High to a chorus of welcome flung at them from a first-floor window over a pastry-cook's shop. Two sleek heads protruded over the cushions in one tier, with three more, less lovingly cemented, in the background.
"Hurry up, Spurs," shouted the president.
The name, applied jointly and severally to the two men, had passed through ingenious refinements before reaching its present brief clarity. If Waring's Christian name was Jack, his inseparable companion Lane must be Jill; if Jack's surname was Waring, Eric's must be Gillow; the home of the furnishing trade, if not of Waring and Gillow, was Tottenham Court Road, which readily suggested Tottenham Hotspurs. An unexplained intellectual craving was at length satisfied when the pair were renamed "the Spurs."
After their first term no one shewed the psychological curiosity to wonder why so incongruous a couple lived together. Though neighbours in Hampshire, they were from different schools and of different colleges; the shrewd but consummately indolent Master of the Drag was the arbiter of taste for sporting, ultra-conservative Oxford—already a personality and almost a tradition; the fine-drawn scholar of Trinity was a recluse, a dreamer and a rebel, with ambition corroding the fabric of a too frail constitution. Outside the Phoenix they had few friends in common, for Eric's disputatious poets grew silent under the breezy onslaught of a more robust generation; Jack's intellectual hunger was satisfied by Surtees, the text-books for his schools, the Sportsman and Morning Post; while Eric, who had divided the first ten years of his life between his father's library at Lashmar Mill-House and a verandah at Broadstairs, had read quickly, brooded deeply and taken up an attitude, sometimes precocious but always clearly defined, towards problems which as yet did not exist for Jack. On one side, the friendship was founded on a worship of opposites; Eric never forgot that he had gone friendless through six years at school because he was forbidden by his doctor to play games. On the other, Jack found devotion a convenience; he respected Eric's brains and needed some one to relieve him of minor exertions and to make up his mind for him. Accordingly, though all the fourth-year men in the University would have been honoured to live with him, it was to Eric that he drawled, "By the way, have you arranged to dig with any one next term? Well, do go and find some decent quarters, there's a good fellow."
"Hullo! No fine to pay after all!" cried Jack, as he burst into the club dining-room and compared the number of covers with the members of the Phoenix already assembled. "Who's coming, Mr. President?"
"O'Rane and Deganway haven't turned up yet," answered Sinclair. "I've just had a wire from Loring to say that he's motoring down with Oakleigh and they'll probably be late. Summertown and Pentyre you can hear. It's their idea of music," he added, as a free fight broke out over the piano in the adjoining room.
Jack studied the menu, inspected the wine on the side-board and elbowed himself a place in the kneeling row at the open window. An interrupted conversation struggled back to plans for the Long Vacation and discussion of the schools. Sinclair, a stocky, simple-minded sportsman, now pitifully embarrassed by his presidential duties, had been chosen to play at Lord's for the University and for the Gentlemen; after that he would tour with the Authentics till the end of the season; and, until the following season, he would interest himself in the management of his father's mines in Yorkshire. Knightrider and Framlingham were destined for the army; Deganway and Pentyre were due to cram for the Foreign Office; Draycott proposed to study art in Paris; and Mayhew had forced his way into Fleet Street and the offices of the "Wicked World." It was a wide dispersal; and all felt that they were changing a life of proved comfort for something unknown and presumably less easy.