haphazard occupants of an omnibus. How we envied him! And he was forever
writing plays which he read to us; which plays, I remember, were always
on the verge of being produced by Irving. We believed in him firmly. He
alone of the little crew had a touch of genius.

Blond, bull-necked Jaffery who rowed in the college boat, and would
certainly have got his blue if he had been amenable to discipline and,
because he was not, got sent down ingloriously from the University at
the beginning of his third year, certainly did not show a sign of it.
Adrian was a bit unaccountable. He wrote poems for the Cambridge Review,
and became Vice-President of the Union; but he ran disastrously to fancy
waistcoats, and shuddered at Dickens because his style was not that of
Walter Pater. For myself, Hilary Freeth--well--I am a happy nonentity. I
have a very mild scholarly taste which sufficient private means,
accruing to me through my late father's acumen in buying a few founder's
shares in a now colossal universal providing emporium, enable me to
gratify. I am a harmless person of no account. But the other three
mattered. They were definite--Jaffery, blatantly definite; Adrian
Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively definite; Tom Castleton,
romantically definite. And poor old Tom was dead. Dear, impossible,
feckless fellow. He took a first class in the Classical Tripos and we
thought his brilliant career was assured--but somehow circumstances
baffled him; he had a terrible time for a dozen years or so, taking
pupils, acting, free-lancing in journalism, his father having, in the
meanwhile, died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune smiled on him. He
secured a professorship at an Australian University. The three of
us--Jaffery and Adrian and I--saw him off at Southampton. He never
reached Australia. He died on the voyage. Poor old Tom!

So I sat, with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking out at my