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some kind, so that her smallest remarks seemed more valuable or significant than other people’s conversation, since they were made in the warm shadow of this mysterious hinterland ofknowledge or emotional force. She had a large number of male friends, whose attentions she encouraged so far as was consistent with an impregnable chastity, and it was some time before Magnus could obtain her undivided attention. He succeeded at last, and for some eight or ten weeks was supremely happy except for a recurrent feeling that she was in some essential way—other than her continued virginity—untouched by him and remote from his comprehension. That was a winter term. In the spring she laughed at him and divided her time between the captain of the University golf team and a professional violinist in the town. As a result of her virtuous favours the golfer went off his game and the violinist often played with mournful inaccuracy: but Margaret Innes continued to live so competently that she derived nothing but enjoyment from their company, and performed her work in the hospital wards with unimpaired efficiency.
    For Magnus the year was productive but ill-managed. He wrote a great deal of flamboyant verse and acquired a reputation for amusing eccentricity when drunk. Stories of his exploits began to circulate, and his more improper mots were widely repeated. In the early months of 1923 there was a brief but ardent recrudescence of his affair with Margaret Innes, and in March of that year she took a very respectable degree and almost immediately secured a position as Resident Surgeon in a hospital in Bradleigh in the North of England. They did not meet again for a long time. In the June of the same year Magnus, with some difficulty, took Second Class Honours in English and celebrated his good fortune by drinking so long with the Lecturer in Anglo-Saxon that they quarrelled violently over the rival merits of Beowulf and the Saga of Burn Njal. Continuing their argument in the street, they presently assaulted each other and were both arrested. They found bail, however, without much difficulty—the police were broad-minded and they had many friends—and the brawl had no more consequence than a little quiet scandal.
    A month later Magnus was interviewed by the Principal of the United Churches’ College in Bombay, himself a graduate of Inverdoon, and obtained an appointment as lecturer inEnglish Literature recently made vacant by the death from malaria of the previous occupant—he also had been a native of Inverdoon. Magnus had no interest in missionary enterprise, but he had long nursed a romantic desire to see India and the opportunity now offered seemed too good to miss. The dominant motive obscured the minor implications of his decision, and he gave little thought to the nature of his immediate environment and the manner in which he would be required to behave as one of the staff of the Churches’ College. He speedily found his obligations irksome, and had not malaria and dysentery made such constant attacks on his colleagues that their number was always under strength his appointment would certainly have terminated long before it did.
    During his three years in Bombay he published two books of verse, the first at his own expense. The second, though much better, resulted in his dismissal from the College. It contained a poem entitled Number Seven that told, in a spirit of brilliant comedy and galloping Hudibrastic lines, the events of an evening in a house of ill-fame in the neighbourhood of Grant Road; and another, called The Sahibs , that described with lively satire a dance at the Yacht Club. The Principal found these verses so distressing to read and so horrible to remember that he was compelled to ask Magnus to resign: that the author of Number Seven should teach literature on a Christian basis was manifestly impossible, and Magnus was requested to forego the courtesy of notice and leave at once.
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