moving affably among the tenants, stopping to greet the judges in their box, leaning over a pen gazing seriously at the cattle. "Queer fellow, my brother," said Sebastian. "He looks normal enough." "Oh, but he's not. If you only knew, he's much the craziest of us, only it doesn't come out at all. He's all twisted inside. He wanted to be a priest, you know." "I didn't." "I think he still does. He nearly became a Jesuit, straight from Stonyhurst. It was awful for Mummy. She couldn't exactly try and stop him, but of course it was the last thing she wanted. Think what people would have said -- the eldest son; it's not as if it had been me. And poor Papa. The Church has been enough trouble to him without that happening. There was a frightful to-do -- monks and monsignori running round the house like mice, and Brideshead just sitting glum and talking about the will of God. He was the most upset, you see, when Papa went abroad -- much more than Mummy really. Finally they persuaded him to go to Oxford and think it over for three years. Now he's trying to make up his mind. He talks of going into the Guards and into the House of Commons and of marrying. He doesn't know what he wants. I wonder if I should have been like that, if I'd gone to Stonyhurst. I should have gone, only Papa went abroad before I was old enough, and the first thing he insisted on was my going to Eton." "Has your father given up religion?" "Well, he's had to in a way; he only took to it when he married Mummy. When he went off, he left that behind with the rest of us. You must meet him. He's a very nice man." 'Sebastian had never spoken seriously of his father before. I said: "It must have upset you all when your father went away." "All but Cordelia. She was too young. It upset me at the time. Mummy tried to explain it to the three eldest of us so that we wouldn't hate Papa. I was the only one who didn't. I believe she wishes I did. I was always his favourite. I should be staying with him now, if it wasn't for this foot. I'm the only one who goes. Why don't you come too? You'd like him." A man with a megaphone was shouting the results of the last event in the field below; his voice came faintly to us. "So you see we're a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he's miserable, she's bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn't; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated -- and I wouldn't know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with it, and that's all I want. ... I wish I liked Catholics more." "They seem just like other people." "My dear Charles, that's exactly what they're not -- particularly in this country, where they're so few. It's not just that they're a clique -- as a matter of fact, they're at least four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time -- but they've got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time. It's quite natural, really, that they should. But you see it's difficult for semi-heathens like Julia and me." We were interrupted in this unusually grave conversation by 1 loud, childish cries from beyond the chimney-stacks, "Sebastian, Sebastian." "Good heavens!" said Sebastian, reaching for a blanket. "That sounds like my sister Cordelia. Cover yourself up." "Where are you?" There came into view a robust child of ten or eleven; she had the unmistakable family characteristics, but had them ill-arranged in a frank and chubby plainness, two thick old-fashioned pigtails hung down her back. "Go away, Cordelia. We've got no clothes on." "Why? You're quite decent. I guessed you were here. You didn't know I was about, did you? I came down with Bridey J and stopped to see Francis Xavier." To me, "He's my pig. Then we had lunch with Colonel Fender and then the show. Francis Xavier got a special mention. That beast Randal got first with a mangy animal. Darling Sebastian, I am pleased to see you again. How's your poor foot?" "Say how-d'you-do to Mr. Ryder." "Oh, sorry. How d'you do?" All the family charm was in her smile. "They're all getting pretty boozy down there, so I came away. I say, who's been painting the office? I went in to look for a shooting stick and saw it." "Be careful what you say. It's Mr. Ryder." "But it's lovely. I say, did you really? You are clever. Why don't you both dress and come down? There's no one about." "Bridey's sure to bring the judges in." "But he won't. I heard him making plans not to. He's very sour to-day. He didn't want me to have dinner with you, but I fixed that. Come on. I'll be in the nursery when you're fit to be seen." * * * We were a sombre little party that evening. Only Cordelia was perfectly at ease, rejoicing in the food, the lateness of the hour and her brothers' company. Brideshead was three years older than Sebastian and I, but he seemed of another generation. He had the physical tricks of his family, and his smile, when it rarely came, was as lovely as theirs; he spoke, in their voice, with a gravity and restraint which in my cousin Jasper would have sounded pompous and false, but in him was plainly un-assumed and unconscious. "I am so sorry to miss so much of your visit," he said to me. "You are being looked after properly? I hope Sebastian is seeing to the wine. Wilcox is apt to be rather grudging when he is on his own." "He's treated us very liberally." "I am delighted to hear it. You are fond of wine?" "Very." "I wish I were. It is such a bond with other men. At Magdalen I tried to get drunk more than once, but I did not enjoy it. Beer and whiskey I find even less appetising. Events like this afternoon's are a torment to me in consequence." "I like wine," said Cordelia. "My-sister Cordelia's last report said that she was not only the worst girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the oldest nun." "That's because I refused to be an Enfant de Marie. Reverend Mother said that if I didn't keep my room tidier I couldn't be one, so I said, Well, I won't be one, and I don't believe Our Blessed Lady cares two hoots whether I put my gym shoes on the left or the right of my dancing shoes. Reverend Mother was livid." "Our Lady cares about obedience." "Bridey, you mustn't be pious," said Sebastian. "We've got an atheist with us." "Agnostic," I said. "Really? Is there much of that at your college? There was a certain amount at Magdalen." "I really don't know. I was one long before I went to Oxford." "It's everywhere," said Brideshead. Religion seemed an inevitable topic that day. For some time we talked about the Agricultural Show. Then Brideshead said, "I saw the Bishop in London last week. You know, he wants to close our chapel." "Oh, he couldn't," said Cordelia. "I don't think Mummy will let him," said Sebastian. "It's too far away," said Brideshead. "There are a dozen families round Melstead who can't get here. He wants to open a mass centre there." "But what about us?" said Sebastian. "Do we have to drive out on winter mornings?" "We must have the Blessed Sacrament here," said Cordelia. "I like popping in at odd times; so does Mummy." "So do I," said Brideshead, "but there are so few of us. It's not as though we were old Catholics with everyone on the estate coming to mass. It'll have to go sooner or later, perhaps after Mummy's time. The point is whether it wouldn't be better to let it go now. You are an artist, Ryder, what do you think of it aesthetically?" "I think it's beautiful" said Cordelia with tears in her eyes. "Is it Good Art?" "Well, I don't quite know what you mean," I said warily. "I think it's a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired." "But surely it can't be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years, and not good now?" "Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don't happen to like it much." "But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good?" "Bridey, don't be so Jesuitical," said Sebastian, but I knew that this disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other, nor ever could. "Isn't that just the distinction'you made about wine?" '"No. I like and think good the end to which wine is sometimes the means -- the promotion of sympathy between man and man. But in my own case it does not achieve that end, so I neither like it nor think it good for me." "Bridey, do stop." "I'm sorry," he said, "I thought it rather an interesting point." "Thank God I went to Eton," said Sebastian. After dinner Brideshead said: "I'm afraid I must take Sebastian away for half an hour. I shall be busy all day to-morrow, and I'm off immediately after the show. I've a lot of papers for Father to sign. Sebastian must take them out and explain them to him. It's time you were in bed, Cordelia." "Must digest first," she said. "I'm not used to gorging like this at night. I'll talk to Charles." "Charles?" said Sebastian. "Charles? Mister Ryder, to you, child." "Come on, Charles." When we were alone she said: "Are you really an agnostic?" "Does your family always talk about religion all the time?" "Not all the time. It's a subject that just comes up naturally, doesn't it?" "Does it ? It never has with me before." "Then perhaps you are an agnostic. I'll pray for you." "That's very kind of you." "I can't spare you a whole rosary you know. Just a decade. I've got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week." "I'm sure it's more than I deserve." "Oh, I've got some harder cases than you. Lloyd George and the Kaiser and Olive Banks." "Who is she?" "She was bunked from the convent last term. I don't quite know what for. Reverend Mother found something she'd been writing. D'you know, if you weren't an agnostic, I should ask you for five shillings to buy a black god-daughter?" "Nothing will surprise me about your religion." "It's a new thing a missionary priest started last term. You send five bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after you. I've got six black Cordelias already. Isn't it lovely?" When Brideshead and Sebastian returned, Cordelia was sent to bed. Brideshead began again on our discussion. "Of course, you are right really," he said. "You take art as a means not as an end. That is strict theology, but it's unusual to find an agnostic believing it." "Cordelia has promised to pray for me," I said. "She made a novena for her pig," said Sebastian. "You know all this is very puzzling to me," I said. "I think we're causing scandal," said Brideshead. That night I began to realize how little I really knew of Sebastian, and to understand why he had always sought to keep me apart from the rest of his life. He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port. Brideshead and Cordelia went away; the tents were struck on the show ground, the flags uprooted; the trampled grass began to regain its colour; the month that had .started in leisurely fashion came swiftly to its end. Sebastian walked without a stick now and had forgotten his injury. "I think you'd better come with me to Venice," he said. "No money." "I thought of that. We live on Papa when we get there. The lawyers pay my fare -- first class and sleeper. We can both travel third for that." And so we went; first by the long, cheap sea-crossing to Dunkirk, sitting all night on deck under a clear sky, watching the grey dawn break over the sand dunes; then to Paris, on wooden seats, where we drove to the Lotti, had baths and shaved, lunched at Foyot's, which was hot and half-empty, loitered sleepily among the shops and sat long in a. half-empty cafe waiting till the time of our train; then in the warm, dusty evening to the Gare de Lyon, to the slow train South; again the wooden seats, a carriage full of the poor, visiting their families -- travelling as the poor do in Northern countries, with a multitude of small bundles and an air of patient submission to authority -- and sailors returning from leave. We slept fitfully, jolting and stopping, changed once in the night, slept again and awoke in an empty carriage, with pine woods passing the windows and the distant view of mountain peaks. New uniforms at the frontier, coffee and bread at the station buffet, people round us of Southern grace and gaiety; on again into the plains, conifers changing to vine and olive, a change of trains at Milan; garlic sausage, bread and a flash of Orvieto bought from a trolley (we had spent all our money save for a few francs, in Paris); the sun mounted high and the country glowed with heat; the carriage filled with peasants, ebbing and flowing at each station; the smell of garlic was overwhelming in the hot carriage. At last in the evening we arrived at Venice. A sombre figure was there to meet us. "Papa's valet, Plender." "I met the express," said Plender. "His Lordship thought you must have looked up the train wrong. This seemed only to come from Milan." "We travelled third." Plender tittered politely. "I have the palace gondola here. I shall follow with the luggage in the vaporetto. His Lordship has gone to the Lido. He was not sure he would be home before you -- that was when we expected you on the express. He should be there by now." He led us to the waiting boat. The gondoliers wore green and white livery and silver plaques on their arms; they smiled and bowed. "Palazzo. Pronto" "Si, Signor Plender." And we floated away. "You've been here before?" "No." "I came once before -- from the sea. This is the way to arrive." "Ecco ci siamo, signori." The palace was a little less than it sounded, a narrow Palladian facade, mossy steps, a dark archway of rusticated stone. One boatman leapt ashore, made fast to the post, rang the bell; the other stood on the prow keeping the craft in to the steps. The doors opened; a man in rather raffish summer livery of striped linen led us up the stairs from shadow into light; the piano nobile was in full sunshine, ablaze with frescoes of the school of Tintoretto. "The marchese at Lido coming quick. Your sleeping this way please. Making wash at once." Our rooms were on the floor above; reached by a precipitous marble staircase, they were shuttered against the afternoon sun; the butler threw them open and we looked on to the Grand Canal; the beds had mosquito nets. "Mostica not now." There was a little bulbous press in each room, a misty, gilt-framed mirror, and no other furniture. The floor was of bare marble slabs. "Make hot wash," said the butler, leaving us. ' "A bit bleak?" asked Sebastian. "Bleak ? Look at that." I led him again to the window and the incomparable pageant below and about us. "No, you couldn't call it bleak." A tremendous explosion next door announced a setback to the hot wash. We went to investigate and found a bathroom which seemed to have been built in a chimney. There was no ceiling; instead the walls ran straight through the floor above • to the open sky. An antiquated geyser was sending out clouds of steam, a strong smell of gas and a tiny trickle of cold water. "No good." "Si, si, subito, signori" The butler ran to the top of the staircase and began to shout down it; a female voice, more strident than his, answered. Sebastian and I returned to the spectacle below our windows. Presently the argument came to an end and a woman and child appeared, who smiled at us, scowled at the butler, and put on Sebastian's press a silver basin and ewer of boiling water. The butler meanwhile unpacked and folded our clothes and, lapsing into Italian, told us of the unrecognized merits of the geyser, until suddenly cocking his head sideways he became alert, said "// signor marchese" and darted downstairs. "We'd better look respectable before meeting Papa," said Sebastian. "We needn't dress. I gather he's alone at the moment" I was full of curiosity to meet Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress. He was standing on the balcony of the saloon which was the main living-room of the palace, and, as he turned to greet us, his face was in deep shadow. I was aware only of a tall and upright figure. "Darling Papa," said Sebastian, "how young you are looking!" He kissed Lord Marchmain on the cheek and I, who had not kissed my father since I left the nursery, stood shyly behind him. "This is Charles. Don't you think my father very handsome, Charles?" Lord Marchmain shook my hand. "Whoever looked up your train," he said -- and his voice also was Sebastian's -- "made a btise. There's no such one." "We came on it." "You can't have. There was only a slow train from Milan at that time. I was at the Lido. I have taken to playing tennis there with the professional in the early evening. It is the only time of day when it is not too hot. I hope you boys will be fairly comfortable upstairs. This house seems to have been designed for the comfort of only one person, and I am that one. I have a room the size of this and a very decent dressing-room. Cara has taken possession of the odier sizeable room." I was fascinated to hear him speak of his mistress, so simply and casually; later I suspected that it was done for effect, for me. "How is she?" "Cara? Well, I hope. She will be back with us to-morrow. She is visiting some American friends at a villa on the Brenta Canal. Where shall we dine? We might go to the Luna, but it is filling up with English now. Would you be too dull at home? Cara is sure to want to go out to-morrow, and the cook here is really quite excellent." He had moved away from the window and now stood in the full evening sunlight, with the red damask of the walls behind him. It was a noble face, a controlled one, just, it seemed, as he planned it to be; slightly weary, slightly sardonic, slightly voluptuous. He seemed in the prime of life; it was odd to think that he was only a few years younger than my father. We dined at a marble table in the windows; everything was either of marble, or velvet, or dull, gilt gesso, in this house. Lord Marchmain said, "And how do you plan your time here? Bathing or sight-seeing?" "Some sight-seeing, anyway," I said. "Cara will like that -- she, as Sebastian will have told you, is your hostess here. You can't do both, you know. Once you go to the Lido there is no escaping -- you play backgammon, you get caught at the bar, you get stupefied by the sun. Stick to the churches. You've just come from England?" "Yes, it was lovely there." "Was it? Was it? It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling-block to my own party. Well, my elder son will change all that, I've no doubt, if they leave him anything to inherit. . . . Why, I wonder, are Italian sweets always thought to be so good ? There was always an Italian pastry-cook at Brides-head until my father's day. He had an Austrian, so much better. And now I suppose there is some British matron with beefy forearms." After dinner we left the palace by the street door and walked through a maze of bridges and squares and alleys, to Florian's for coffee, and watched the grave crowds crossing and re-crossing under the Campanile. "There is nothing quite like a Venetian crowd," said Lord Marchmain. "The country is crawling with Communists, but an American woman tried to sit here the other night with bare shoulders and they drove her away by coming to stare at her, quite silently; they were like circling gulls coming back and back to her, until she left. Our countrymen are much less dignified when they attempt to express moral disapproval." An English party had just then come from the water-front, made for a table near us, and then suddenly moved to the other side, where they looked askance at us and talked with their heads close together. "That is a man and his wife I used to know when I was in politics. A prominent member o your church, Sebastian." As we went up to bed that night Sebastian said: "He's rather a poppet, isn't he?" Lord Marchmain's mistress arrived next day. I was nineteen years old and completely ignorant of women. I could not with any certainty recognize a prostitute in the streets. I was therefore not indifferent to the fact of living under the roof of an adulterous couple, but I was old enough to hide my interest. Lord March-main's mistress, therefore, found me with a multitude of conflicting expectations about her, all of which were, for the moment, disappointed by her appearance. She was not a voluptuous Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque; she was not a "little bit of fluff'; she was a middle-aged, well-preserved, well-dressed, well-mannered woman such as I had seen in countless public places and occasionally met. Nor did she seem marked by any social stigma. On the day of her arrival we lunched at the Lido, where she was greeted at almost every table. "Vittoria Corombona has asked us all to her ball on Saturday." "It is very kind of her. You know I do not dance," said Lord Marchmain. "But for the boys? It is a thing to be seen -- the Corombona palace lit up for the ball. One does not know how many such balls there will be in the future." "The boys can do as they like. We must refuse." "And I have asked Mrs. Hacking Brunner to luncheon. She has a charming daughter. Sebastian and his friend will like her." "Sebastian and his friend are more interested in art than heiresses." "But that is what I have always wished," said Cara, changing her point of attack adroitly. "I have been here more times than I can count and Alex has not once let me inside San Marco even. We will become tourists, yes?" We became tourists; Cara enlisted as guide a midget Venetian nobleman to whom all doors were open, and with him at her side and a guide-book in her hand, she came with us, flagging sometimes but never giving up, a neat, prosaic figure amid the immense splendours of the place. The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly -- perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life, kept pace with the gondola, as we nosqd through the side-canals and die boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days, with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging in the prow and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering fishes; of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning; of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at the English bar. I remember Sebastian looking up at the Colleoni statue and saying, "It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war." I remember most particularly one conversation towards the end of my visit. Sebastian had gone to play tennis with his father and Cara at last admitted to fatigue. 'We sat in the late afternoon at the windows overlooking the Grand Canal, she on the sofa with a piece of needlework, I in an armchair, idle. It was the first time we had been alone together. "I think you are very fond of Sebastian," she said. "Why, certainly." "I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long." She was so composed and matter-of-fact that I could not take I her amiss, but I failed to find an answer. She seemed not to ' expect one but continued stitching, pausing sometimes to match the silk from a work bag at her side. "It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl. Alex you see had it for a girl, for his wife. Do you think he loves me?" "Really, Cara, you ask the most embarrassing questions. How should I know? I assume ..." "He does not. But not the littlest piece. Then why does he stay with me? I will tell you; because I protect him from Lady I Marchmain. He hates her; but you can have no conception how he hates her. You would think him so calm and English -- the milord, rather blase, all passion dead, wishing to be comfortable and not to be worried, following the sun, with me to look after that one thing that no man can do for himself. My friend, he is •' a volcano of hate. He cannot breathe the same air as she. He will not set foot in England because it is her home; he can scarcely be happy with Sebastian because he is her son. But Sebastian hates her too." "I'm sure you're wrong there." "He may not admit it to you. He may not admit it to himself; they are full of hate -- hate of themselves. Alex and his family. . . . Why do you think he will never go into Society?" "I always thought people had turned against him." "My dear boy, you are very young. People turn against a handsome, clever, wealthy man like Alex? Never in your life. It is he who has driven them away. Even now they come back again and again to be snubbed and laughed at. And all for Lady Marchmain. He will not touch a hand which may have touched hers. When we have guests I see him thinking, 'Have they perhaps just come from Brideshead? Are they on their way to Marchmain House? Will they speak of me to my wife? Are they a link between me and her whom I hate?' But, seriously, with my heart, that is how he thinks. He is mad. And how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except be loved by someone who was not grown-up. I have never met Lady March-main; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other women he has loved. I know Lady March-main very well. She is a good and simple woman whp has been loved in the wrong way. "When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood -- innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving. "Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence. We are comfortable. "Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His Teddy-bear, his Nanny . . . and he is nineteen years old. . . ." She stirred on her sofa, shifting her weight so that she could look down at the passing boats, and said in fond, mocking tones: "How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love," and then added with a sudden swoop to earth, "Sebastian drinks too much." "I suppose we both do." "With you it does not matter. I have watched you together. With Sebastian it is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him. I have known so many. Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me; it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your way." We arrived in London on the day before term began. On the way from Charing Cross I dropped Sebastian in the forecourt of his mother's house. "Here is 'Marchers,'" he said with a sigh which meant the end of a holiday. "I won't ask you in, the place is probably full of my family. We'll meet at Oxford." I drove on to Hyde Park Gardens. My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret. "Here to-day," he said; "gone to-morrow. I seem to see very little of you. Perhaps it is dull for you here. How could it be otherwise? You have enjoyed yourself?" "Very much. I went to Venice." "Yes. Yes. I suppose so. The weather was fine?" When he went to bed after an evening of silent study, he paused to ask: "The friend you were so much concerned about, did he die?" "No." "I am very thankful. You should have written to tell me. I worried about him so much." Chapter Five "It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn." Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, like those of a foreign village seen from the slopes outside; new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year's memories. The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers, whose scent at my windows now yielded to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad. It was the first Sunday evening of term. "I feel precisely one hundred years old," said Sebastian. He had come up the night before, a day earlier than I, and this was our first meeting since we parted in the taxi. "I've had a talking-to from Monsignor Bell this afternoon. That makes the fourth since I came up -- my tutor, the junior dean, Mr. Samgrass of All Souls, and now Monsignor Bell." "Who is Mr. Samgrass of All Souls?" "Just someone of Mummy's. They all say that I made a very bad start last year, that I have been noticed, and that if I don't mend my ways I shall get sent down. How does one mend one's ways? I suppose one joins the League of Nations Union, and reads the Isif every week, and drinks coffee in the morning at the Cadena caf 4 and smokes a great pipe and plays hockey and goes out to tea on Boar's Hill and to lectures at Keble, and rides a bicycle with a little tray full of note-books and drinks cocoa in the evening and discusses sex seriously. Oh, Charles, what has happened since last term? I feel so old." "I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse, I believe we have had all the fun we can expect here." We sat silent in the firelight as darkness fell. "Anthony Blanche has gone down." "Why?" "He wrote to me. Apparently he's taken a flat in Munich--he has formed an attachment to a policeman there." "I shall miss him." "I suppose I shall, too, in a way." We fell silent again and sat so still in the firelight that a man who came in to see me stood for a moment in the door and then went away thinking the room empty. "This is no way to start a new year," said Sebastian; but this sombre October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, j the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian's bedroom. There was a change in both of us. We had lost the sense of discovery, which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down. Unexpectedly, I missed my cousin Jasper, who had got his first in Greats and was now cumbrously setting about a life of public mischief in London; I needed him to shock; without that massive presence the college seemed to lack solidity; it no longer provoked and gave point to outrage as it had done in the summer. Moreover, I had come back glutted and a little chastened, with the resolve to go slow. Never again would I expose myself to my father's humour; his whimsical persecution had convinced me, as no rebuke could have done, of the folly of living beyond my means. I had had no talking-to this term; my success in History Previous and a beta minus- in one of my Collections papers had put me on easy terms with my tutor -- which I managed to maintain without undue effort. I kept a tenuous connection with the History School, wrote my two essays a week and attended an occasional lecture. Besides this I started my second year by joining the Ruskin School of Art; two or three mornings a week we met, about a dozen of us--half, at least, the daughters of North Oxford -- among the casts from the antique at the Ashmolean Museum; twice a week we drew from the nude in a small room over a teashop; some pains were taken by the authorities to exclude any hint of lubricity on these evenings, and the young woman who sat to us was brought from London for the day and not allowed to reside in the University city; one flank, that nearer the oil stove, I remember, was always rosy and the other mottled and puckered as though it had been plucked. There, in the smell of the oil lamp, we sat astride the donkey stools and evoked a barely visible wraith of Trilby. My drawings were worthless; in my own rooms I designed elaborate little pastiches, some of which, preserved by friends of the period, come to light occasionally to embarrass me. We were instructed by a man of about my age, who treated us with defensive hostility; he wore very dark blue shirts, a lemon-yellow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, and it was largely by reason of this warning that I modified my own style of dress until it approximated to what my cousin Jasper would have thought suitable for country-house visiting. Thus soberly dressed and happily employed I became a fairly respectable member of my college. With Sebastian it was different. His year of anarchy had filled a deep, interior need of his, the escape from reality, and as he found himself increasingly hemmed in, where he once felt himself free, he became at times listless and morose, even with me. We kept very much to our own company that term, each so much bound up in the other that we did not look elsewhere for friends. My cousin Jasper had told me that it was normal to spend one's second year shaking off the friends of one's first, and it happened as he said. Most of my friends were those I had made through Sebastian; together we shed them and made no others. There was no renunciation. At first we seemed to see them as often as ever; we went to parties but gave few of our own. I was not concerned to impress the new freshmen who, like their London sisters, were here-being launched in society; there were strange faces now at every party and I, who a few months back had been voracious of new acquaintances^ now felt surfeited; even our small circle of intimates, so lively in the summer sunshine, seemed dimmed and muted now in the pervading fog, the river-borne twilight that softened and obscured all that year for me. Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had always been a stranger, needed him now. The Charity matinee was over, I felt; the impresario had | buttoned his astrakhan coat and taken his fee and the disconsolate ladies of the company were without a leader. Without him they forgot their cues and garbled their lines; they needed him to ring the curtain up at the right moment; they needed him to direct the limelights; they needed his whisper in the wings, and his imperious eye on the leader of the band; without him there were no photographers from the weekly press, no prearranged goodwill and expectation of pleasure. No stronger bond held them together than common service; now the gold lace and velvet were packed away and returned to the costumier and the drab uniform of the day put on in its stead. For a few happy hours of rehearsal, for a few ecstatic minutes of performance, they had played splendid parts, their own great ancestors, the famous paintings they were thought to resemble; now it was over and in the bleak light of day they must go back to their homes; to the husband who came to London too often, to the lover who lost at cards, and to the child who grew too fast. Anthony Blanche's set broke up and became a bare dozen lethargic, adolescent Englishmen. Sometimes in later life they would say: "Do you remember that extraordinary fellow we used all to know at Oxford -- Anthony Blanche? I wonder what became of him." They lumbered back into the herd from which they had been so capriciously chosen and grew less and less individually recognizable. The change was not so apparent to them as to us, and they still congregated on occasions in our rooms; but we gave up seeking them. Instead we formed the taste for lower company and spent our evenings, as often as not, in Hogarthian little inns in St. Ebb's and St. Clement's and the streets between the old market and the canal, where we managed to be gay and were, I believe, well liked by the company. The Gardener's Arms and the Nag's Head, the Druid's Head near the theatre, and the Turf in Hell Passage knew us well; but in the last of these we were liable to meet other undergraduates-- pub-crawling hearties from BNC--and Sebastian became possessed by a kind of phobia, like that which sometimes comes over men in uniform against their own service, so that many an evening was spoilt by their intrusion, and he would leave his glass half empty and turn sulkily back to college. It was thus that Lady Marchmain found us when, early in that Michaelmas term, she came for a week to Oxford. She found Sebastian subdued, with all his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian's friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me. Her business in Oxford was with Mr. Samgrass of All Souls, who now began to play an increasingly large part in our lives. Lady Marchmain was engaged in making a memorial book for circulation among her friends, about her brother, Ned, the eldest of three legendary heroes all killed between Mons and Paschen-daele; he had left a quantity of papers -- poems, letters, speeches, articles; to edit them even for a restricted circle needed tact and countless decisions in which the judgment of an adoring sister was liable to err.