being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.

At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for
Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and
self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial
friends. I got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to
speak in the Union, and in my little set we were all pretty busily
sharpening each other's wits and correcting each other's
interpretations. Cambridge made politics personal and actual. At
City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective contact; we
boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a colonial governor
among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such
distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive
and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to be in
earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the
abolition of "water," and find a shuddering personal interest in the
ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that
I touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came
down to debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college
intimates, their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them
real to us. They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for
the first time in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my
secret vice had become a virtue.

That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and
various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors
who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their
place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more
athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to
the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The