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but Timmy, while playing up to them amiably enough, was reputed at times to brood over the curious family industry which was the occasion of them. So now Winter sighed and said dryly: ‘Oh, that.’ He felt that he was unlikely to be helpful about the Spider.
    But Timmy shook his head. ‘It’s not’, he said, ‘just the old quiet fun. It’s something queer at home. Something – well – that seems to be happening to daddy.’
    To Winter Mr Eliot the elder was not much more than a name and an odd reputation. He thought it sufficient therefore to indicate conventional concern. ‘Happening?’ he murmured.
    ‘Doomed to the bin.’
    ‘Doomed to the bin – the Spider? You mean he’s being scrapped?’
    ‘Not the Spider, daddy. And I mean he seems to be going gently off his rocker. Taking something to heart. I don’t know quite what to do about it. Awkward thing in a family. I thought you might think of something.’ And Timmy, with a fragment of muffin he had reserved for the purpose, began mopping up the surplus butter in the muffin dish. He did it in jabs that echoed the jerky sentences.
    There was a little silence. A bus rumbled down the High and Winter’s windows rattled angrily; from the quad below floated up the voices of hearty men discussing a football practice. Winter straightened himself, feeling that somnolescence was no longer decent. ‘The facts,’ he said.
    ‘Very simple. He thinks the Spider has come alive.’
    ‘Come alive?’ Experience with undergraduate predicaments did not prevent Winter feeling uncomfortable.
    ‘Just that. Pygmalion and Galatea situation. The beloved marble stirs and lives. Only daddy doesn’t greatly love the Spider.’
    Winter looked at his pupil suspiciously. ‘What – if anything – has actually happened?’
    ‘A joke – put across by some precious ass on daddy. And it’s been too dam’ successful.’ Timmy pushed the empty muffin dish away ungratefully. ‘Doomed to the bin,’ he repeated and seemed to find comfort in this succinct statement of the worst.
    ‘Surely it’s not as bad as all that. Whatever the joke may have been, your father will presumably forget about it in time.’
    ‘You haven’t got the idea. The joke’s still going on.’
    ‘Oh!’ Winter looked disconcerted.
    ‘It’s quite a tale – and goes back some months. I expect you know how a person in daddy’s situation may be pestered. He’s read by hundreds of thousands of people, and that means by hundreds of mild pests. There are always a few badgering him. They’re being poisoned by their wives or shut up as mad by their uncles or systematically persecuted by the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the old days they sometimes complained that the Spider was after them with a gun. You can imagine all that.’
    ‘Effortlessly.’ Fellows of Oxford colleges, Winter was thinking, are seldom subjected to such paranoiac importunities and would be uncommonly worried if they were. ‘I gather you’ve even been badgered a bit yourself.’
    ‘Oh, that. It was a bit bad at my prepper. They called me Miss Muffet. That was worse, somehow, than Webster. I’ve never minded much since, really. Do you know that at Balliol there’s a man whose father is the world’s biggest manufacturer of–’
    ‘No doubt. But to your tale.’
    ‘Well, it’s characteristic of these badgerers that they fade out. I suppose when they get no change they turn to badgering someone else. That’s one thing that makes the present badgerer unique: tenacity. And there’s another. Daddy’s had lots of messages and so on about the Spider as if he were a real person; he’s never had any from the Spider as if he were a real person.’
    ‘Surely it’s an obvious enough joke? You don’t mean to say’ – there was decent anxiety in Winter’s voice – ‘that your father is seriously–’
    ‘This badgerer’, Timmy interrupted, ‘knows too much. He has a sort of slogan: The Spider Knows All . And