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disproportionately attired. Round his neck were accumulated a sweater, a towel, a blazer, and a large muffler; below this level he wore nothing but a pair of shoes, and diminutive shorts cut in the faith that the squatting position is the only one known to man. This peg-top appearance is common in those who have just come off the river, and there was nothing out of the way about the young man except the haste which had suddenly possessed him. As if the ghosts had verily appeared to him, he ran. Ignoring another friend’s call, he charged across the college lawn – a route which would have cost him five shillings had a traditionally minded don observed him – tripped over the college tortoise, recovered, skilfully swerved round an advancing tray of crumpets and anchovy-toast, dodged through a narrow archway and pounded up a dark and ancient staircase. A dim person, whom the youth hailed as Webster had long believed to be a kitchen-man but who was in point of fact the Regius Professor of Eschatology, stood politely aside to let him pass; he took the last treads at a bound, thumped at a door, pitched himself precipitately through it, and collapsed into a wickerwork chair – a chair, like his shorts, moulded to a theory: this time that man sits not, but either curls or sprawls.
    Gerald Winter, the don who owned the room, surveyed his panting visitor, enunciated with simple irony the words, ‘Come in’, and helped himself to a muffin from a dish by the fire. Then, resigning himself to the exercise of hospitality, he said, ‘Muffin.’
    The young man took half a muffin. Presently he scrambled up the back of the chair and reached himself a cup and saucer. ‘I’m frightfully sorry’, he murmured conventionally as he poured out tea, ‘to burst in.’ He jumped up and foraged three lumps of sugar. One he ate and the others he dropped with a splash in his cup. And then he sat down again, looked warily at his host and fidgeted. ‘Frightfully sorry,’ he repeated inanely and vaguely. He was a young man with a firm mouth and a resolute chin.
    Winter made a movement after the kettle that concealed a scrutiny of his guest. ‘My good Timmy,’ he said – for it was only Timothy Eliot’s closest friends who were privileged to call him Webster; and Winter, who was merely his tutor, was not of this degree of intimacy – ‘My good Timmy, not at all.’ He began to fill his pipe, which was a ritual indicating a mood of sympathetic leisure. He was by no means attached to the role of confidential adviser to the young; nevertheless this job frequently fell to him. Troubles material and spiritual came regularly up his staircase, sometimes at a resistless bound, sometimes with the most dubious pauses landing by landing. The Professor of Eschatology had formed the conclusion that Winter was a sinisterly sociable person. Actually Winter was rather shy and when he heard these characteristic approaches he frequently took refuge on the roof. But Timothy Eliot had caught him and now he said briefly: ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘It’s the Spider.’
    Winter looked gloomy. If there was anything tedious about Timmy it was a chronic sensitiveness about this harmless invention of his father’s. Since coming up to Oxford Timmy had been constrained to endure a good deal of fun about the Spider, for it is a characteristic of undergraduates to revive kinds of humour in abeyance since they left their private schools. There was, for instance, the amusement of addressing Timmy out of what was called Webster’s Dictionary: which meant weaving into conversation – if possible undetected – phrases from the earlier and more picturesque conversation of Mr Eliot’s hero. And there was the solemn assumption that Timmy himself was the author of the books, this being an ingenious way of avoiding the impropriety of making direct fun of a man’s parent. The jokes about Webster Eliot were judiciously intermittent – to harp on them would have been boorish –