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and then, relaxing, drank and argued and made a night of it in the best Swithin’s tradition; when eventually the affair broke up, it was Rainier himself who asked if my invitation to coffee still held good.
    “Why, of course—only I thought maybe after the dentist you’d
    feel—“
    “My dear boy, don’t ever try to imagine what my feelings are.”
    But he smiled in saying it, and I gathered he had forgiven not so much me as himself for having taken part in our train conversation.  A few friends adjourned to my rooms near by, where we sat around and continued discussions informally.  Again he charmed us by his talk, but even more by his easy manners and willingness to laugh and listen; long after most of the good-nights he still lingered chatting, listening, and smoking cigarette after cigarette.  I didn’t know then that he slept badly and liked to stay up late, that he enjoyed young company and jokes and midnight argument, that he had no snobbisms, and that public speaking left him either very dull and listless or very excitable and talkative, according to the audience.  Towards three in the morning, when we found ourselves sole survivors, I suggested more coffee, and at that he sank into an armchair with a sigh of content and put his feet against the mantelpiece as if the place belonged to him—which, in a sense, it did, as to any Swithin’s man since the reign of Elizabeth the Foundress.  “I’ve been in these rooms before—often.  Fellow with the disarming name of Pal had them in my time—‘native of Asia or Africa not of European parentage,’ as the University regulations so tactfully specify.  High-caste Hindoo.  Mathematician—genius in his own line—wonder what he’s doing now?--probably distilling salt out of sea-water or lying down in front of trains or some other blind-alley behaviour.  Used to say he felt algebra emotionally— told me once he couldn’t read through the Binomial Theorem without tears coming into his eyes—the whole concept, he said, was so shatteringly beautiful. . . .  Wish I could have got into his world, somehow or other.  And there are other worlds, too—wish sometimes I could get into any of them—out of my own.”
    “What’s so wrong about your own?”
    He laughed defensively.  “Now there you’ve got me. . . .  Maybe, as you hinted yesterday, just a matter of overwork.  But it’s true enough that talking to all you young fellows tonight made me feel terribly ancient and envious.”
    “Not ENVIOUS, surely?  It’s we who are envious of you—because you’ve made a success of life.  We’re a pretty disillusioned crowd when we stop laughing—we know there won’t be jobs for more than a minority of us unless a war comes to give all of us the kind of job we don’t want.”
    He mused over his coffee for a moment and then continued:  “Yes, that’s true—and that’s probably why I feel how different everything is here instead of how much the same—because my Cambridge days WERE different.  The war was just over then, and our side had won, and we all of us thought that winning a great war ought to mean something, either towards making our lives a sort of well-deserved happy-ever-after—a long golden afternoon of declining effort and increasing reward—or else to give us chances to rebuild the world this way or that.  It all depended whether one were tired or eager after the strain.  Most of us were both—tired of the war and everything connected with it, eager to push ahead into something new.  We soon stopped hating the Germans, and just as soon we began to laugh at the idea of anyone caring enough about the horrid past to ask us that famous question on the recruiting posters—‘What did you do in the Great War?’  But even the most cynical of us couldn’t see ahead to a time when the only logical answer to that question would be another one—‘WHICH Great War?’
    “There was a room over a fish shop in Petty Cury where some