no splendid women fit to be our companions in the world. But

Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was

gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of

her; just simply and with projectile violence: "My God!

Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be

married to him-we thought that splendid beyond measure,-I cannot

now imagine why. She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said. A

sort of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal

intentions when Benton committed himself to that. And after such

talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotionaldreaming, and if

by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's

daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or

obstreperously indifferent to her. For might she not be just that

one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless

conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we lived?

We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially

this same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the

Cam. We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase

that we flourished about in the Union and made our watchword,

namely, "stark fact." We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if

they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I

disinterred my long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak,

and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a

companion I never cared for in the slightest degree…

This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped,

our more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and

three of us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was

Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was

Esmeer and myself who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken

the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three

years later I got a lectureship in political science. In those days

it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.

2

It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream

of undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our

beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be

differentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except

Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an

appetite for ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the

other hand we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre,

deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild

undergraduate men who made up the mass of Cambridge life. After the

manner of youth we were altogether too hard on our contemporaries.

We battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should seem new,

and we despised these others extremely for doing exactly the same

things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure a

similar weakness in these our brothers.

There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type-I'm a

little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it-

for which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys,"

intending thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal

measure. The Pinky Dinky summarised all that we particularly did

not want to be, and also, I now perceive, much of what we were and

all that we secretly dreaded becoming.

But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant

so much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading

party upon the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk

in the rain-it was our only wet day-smoked our excessively virile

pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We

improvised a sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied

deep notes for the responses.

"The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life," said

some one.

"Damned prig! " said Hatherleigh.

"The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a

light gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he

cannot go on because of the amusement he extracts."

"I want to shy books at the giggling swine," said Hatherleigh.

"The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're

all being frightfully funny. It's time for you to say something

now.'"

"The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never

be a responsiblebeing.' And he really IS frivolous."

"Frivolous but not vulgar," said Esmeer.

"Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped," said

Hatherleigh. "They're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the

Guts to get hold of things. And so they worry up all those silly

little jokes of theirs to carry it off."…

We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.

Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to

keep outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters'

shops with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out

funny, and not be snobs to customers, no!-not even if they had

titles."

"Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than

most Pinky Dinky's people. But he does not put on side."

"Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women."