then in an instant all the familiar pattern of their speech would vanish, and their words could not have been stranger to him had they spoken in a foreign tongue.
Thus, as Eugene looked at the young undergraduates playing in the fields below the house, their shouts and cries, the boyish roughness of their play, their strong scurfed knees, and panting breath, evoked the image of a life so familiar to him that he felt all he had to do to enter it again was to walk across the velvet width of lawn that separated him from it. But if he passed these same people two hours later in the High Street, their lives, their words were stranger than in a dream, or they seemed to have an incredible fictitious quality that made everything they did or said seem false, mannered, and affected, so that when he listened to them he had a feeling of resentment and contempt for them as if they spoke and moved with the palpable falseness of actors.
Eugene would see two young fellows before a college gate, and one, fragile of structure, with a small lean head, a sheaf of straight blond hair and thin sensitive features which were yet sharply and strongly marked, would be talking to another youth, his hands thrust jauntily into the pockets of his baggy grey trousers as he talked and the worn elegance of his baggy coat falling across his hands in folds of jaunty well-worn smartness.
“I say!” the youth would be saying in his crisp, rapid, sharply blurred inflections that seemed to come out of lips that barely moved. “Where were you last night? We missed you at the party in old Lambert’s rooms, you know. Everyone wondered why you didn’t turn up.”
“Oh,” the other said (but the way he said this word sounded almost like “Ow” to Eugene). “Did they? I’m frightfully sorry to have missed it, but I simply couldn’t get thöh. Had dinner with a chap I know at Magdalen. His sister’s down for a day or so, and later on I simply couldn’t break away.—How was the party?”
“Ow!” the other cried, casting his head back with a strong quick movement and an exultant little laugh. “Ripping! Simply ripping! What a shame you had to miss it! Old Fenton got quite squiffy about ten o’clock,” he went on affectionately and with his exultant little laugh, “and really it was priceless! He insisted on doing an imitation of Queen Victoria sitting down to read The Times—Ow!” he cried exultantly again, casting his head up with a sharp strong movement, “the whole thing was convulsing!—To see old Fenton settle down!” he
