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needed for this abrupt departure. ‘I think I’m going to like Oxford.’ And he had whisked Rachel out before anyone could say a word.
    Nigel and Nicholas also began to make movements of departure. ‘I must be off now,’ Nicholas said firmly.
    â€˜No, don’t go,’ said Robert hurriedly. ‘Stay and have dinner with us.’ He waved his hand dejectedly in the direction of Yseut, and semaphored distress signals.
    â€˜I’d love to, but I’m afraid I’m dining with a friend in New College. And I’m late already.’
    â€˜What about you?’ Robert addressed Nigel plaintively.
    But Nigel had absolutely no wish to dine with Yseut. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said mendaciously, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve got an engagement too.’
    â€˜Oh dear,’ said Robert.
    â€˜By the way,’ said Nigel as they turned to go, ‘what time is the rehearsal tomorrow?’
    â€˜Ten o’clock,’ answered Robert dismally. They left him sunk in gloom, and Yseut smiling like an overfed cat.
    In the doorway a somewhat drunk R.A.F. officer cannoned into Nicholas, and recovering himself, stared at him blearily for a few seconds.
    â€˜Bloody type!’ he announced technically. ‘Why the hell aren’t you in uniform – bloody type!’
    â€˜I’m part of the culture you’re fighting to defend,’ said Nicholas looking at him coolly; he had been invalided out of the army after Dunkirk.
    â€˜Bloody pongo!’ said the R.A.F. officer, and feeling his vocabulary exhausted, went his way.
    Nigel looked curiously at his companion as they left the hotel. ‘I should imagine
Coriolanus
is one of your favourite plays,’ he said.
    Nicholas smiled. ‘In a way you’re right; “the common cry of curs”, you mean. But it’s not snobbishness; it’s just a congenital inability to suffer fools gladly. I think that’s the chief reason,not any moral scruples, why I so loathe that bitch Yseut. Someone is going to kill or mutilate that girl one day – and I for one shan’t be sorry.’
    Outside, Nigel left him. And as he strolled back to dine at his college, he was more than usually thoughtful.

3. Trying Tender Voices
    An ancient fabric raised t’ inform the sight
    There stood of yore, and Barbican it night …
    Where infant punks their tender voices try,
    And little Maximins the gods defy.
    Dryden
    It was well after midnight when Nigel left Fen’s room in St Christopher’s to return to the ‘Mace and Sceptre’. Their talk had been of old acquaintances, old days, of the present state of the college, and of the effects of the war on the university as a whole. ‘Morons!’ Fen had said of the present set of undergraduates, ‘Sophomores!’ And from the glimpses Nigel had had of them he was greatly inclined to agree. The average age of the college had been much reduced, and a sort of standard public-school prefect’s common-room type had superseded the more adult eccentricities and individualities which had existed before the war. Then, again, there were more people reading science, and fewer reading arts, and this Nigel, with the instinctive snobbery of the arts man, deplored.
    But throughout the evening he had been distrait. Something of the tangled implications of the Yseut situation had been conveyed to him by that brief conversation before dinner, and he was now less inclined to be amused than he had been at first. He remembered Donald Fellowes trembling with rage in his chair, Nicholas’ cold sneer, Robert’s instinctive, almost physical repugnance for the girl; and there were other threads which as yet he had not seen. A little vaguely, he wondered how the situation would resolve itself. Probably, like most of these
impasses
, it would melt away with the removal of one or more of its elements. Nigel, who was naturally lazy, deplored hasty decisions and