We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and

tolerating attitude. "I don't mind a certain refinement and

dignity," he admitted generously. "What I object to is this

spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it

makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things,

until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or

think-even think! until it leads to our coming to-to the business

at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of

dirty jokes and, and "-he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch

his image in the air-" oh, a confounded buttered slide of

sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and

talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at

present. I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You

men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and

marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask.

You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly,

sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like-like Cambridge

humorists… I mean to know what I'm doing."

He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But

one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than

one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not

know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed. Iam,

however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were

pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common

property of our set was developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid

down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there

were really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and

the man who subdues his mind to other people's.

"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory

tones; "that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to

run between fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to he able to think

of anything. And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's

another servant's saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us.

If we see fit, that is."

A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.

"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are

we up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't

to be thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these

extra years for getting things straight in our heads, and then we

won't use 'em. Good God! what do you think a university's for?"…

Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of

us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were

going to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in

and see what came of it. We became for a time even intemperately

experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent

psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within

a fortnight of our great elucidation.

The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of

sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our

intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our

imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went

round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall

prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy

November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from

Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we

weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage. The

fine dim night-time spaces of the Great Court are bound up with the

inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared wrangles; the narrows of

Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill have their particular

associations for me with that spate of confession and free speech,

that almost painfulgoal delivery of long pent and crappled and

sometimes crippled ideas.

And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called

Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that

goes under a bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we

boated and bathed and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the

body until at moments it seemed to us that we were destined to

restore the Golden Age, by the simple abolition of tailors and

outfitters.

Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how

splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething

minds! We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs

towards Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen

moonlight singing and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with

one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were