bantered Harold on his choice of colour, and everybody--anxious as
always to please and placate the owner of the world--laughed with
father against Harold. But Harold did not laugh. Harold smouldered
resentment and defiance, and out of his smouldering began to maintain
"from what chaps had said" that Oxford was altogether and in every
way a much better place than Cambridge. In every branch of athletics
there were better athletes, growled Harold, at Oxford.

Rosalie has been watching the embers in her father's face glowing
to dark-red heat. Everybody had been watching them except Harold
who, though addressing his father, had been mumbling "what chaps
had said" to his plate.

"Athletes!" cried Rosalie's father suddenly in a very terrible
voice. "Athletes! And what about scholars, sir?"

Harold informed his plate that he wasn't talking about scholars.

Rosalie's father raised a marmalade jar and thumped it down upon
the table so that it cracked. "Then what the dickens right have
you to talk at all, sir? How dare you try to compare Oxford with
Cambridge when you know no more about either than you know of
Jupiter or Mars? Athletes!" He went off into record of University
contests, cricket scores, running times, football scores, as if
his whole life had been devoted to collecting them. They all showed
Cambridge first and Oxford beaten and he hurled each one at Harold's
head with a thundering, "What about that, sir?" after it. He leapt
to scholarship and reeled off scholarships and scholars and schools,
and professors and endowments and prize men, as if he had been an
educational year-book gifted with speech and with particularly loud