contrived a young woman to match them. I think I could have seen to
it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis
with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom
fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that it
isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military
manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so
forth, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I
should have fed and housed my men clean and very hard--where there
wasn't any audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high
pressure douches. . . .

I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came
down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those
two places. . . .

Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an
underground room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling
of ineradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow
ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy little villas.
Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic
system and none of its evil. . . .

Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but
their collective effect is below the quality of any individual among
them. Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle
humours, of prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but
it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary
between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of
literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal