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the senior common-room is dictated by Dr Groper. The little table, the middle-sized table, the big table, and the supernumerary table are his idea.
    A distinguished mathematics and for long Master of the college, Dr Groper worked out his system during the anxious period when Oxford was awaiting the news of Waterloo. His dispositions have been respected ever since for the simple reason that he made a considerable endowment of the college cellar dependent on them. It is true that in the mid-nineteenth century a radically-minded Master, who was voraciously sociable and objected particularly to the little table, persuaded his colleagues to take legal advice. But learned counsel, after studying Dr Groper’s will with the help of several Cambridge mathematicians, delivered the opinion that the system is rational, reasonable, and in no way repugnant to the public interest; in fact that if the system goes, half the cellar fund must go as well. The system has never been questioned since.
    Dr Groper desired that an edifying time should be had by all, and by all equally; and to the realization of this proposition he dedicated his science. The after-dinner hour, he believed, is peculiarly propitious to those sudden starts of mind by which the boundaries of human knowledge are extended. Periodically, therefore, a scholar should have the opportunity of discussing his port in meditative seclusion. Hence the little table, which stands apart and furnished for one in a corner of the room; here every Fellow of the college must take his place in turn and await such inspiration as may visit him. Next comes the middle-sized table, which is for three; here Dr Groper hoped for fruitful discussions of a sustained and serious sort. The big table is for seven, and at this conversation is naturally more general and fragmentary; Dr Groper mentioned in his will that he solicited innocent mirth. And this completes the normal arrangements. The college is small and these eleven places accommodate the Master and statutory number of Fellows. Their orderly progression night by night from table to table would be a simple affair but for the complication introduced by occasional guests. When such are present they are entertained at the supernumerary table by the Master, the Dean, and the Fellow who would normally sit fifth at the big table supposing – as is not the case – that no guests are ever entertained on Sunday. It is this last provision that makes the calculations a little complicated; it was instituted by Dr Groper as likely to maintain the standard of mathematical study in the college. And over the system’s learnedly ordered convivialities the figure of Dr Groper still presides in the shape of a portrait by Raeburn. A puffy man in rusty clericals, he stands pointing with an incongruously military gesture at the open page of his own justly celebrated Commentary on Newton’s Principia . Beside him rests a brilliantly rendered silver and brass orrery. A touch of that gesturing hand – it seems – would set planets and moons on their intricate dance about the sun. But Dr Groper’s eye is outward over the common-room, as if controlling the scarcely less elaborate and secular gyrations which his will has imposed on generations of scholars unborn.
    Into the familiar embraces of the Groper system came Gerald Winter and his colleagues after hall. They had been obliged to walk across two quadrangles in a drizzling rain – for the life of dons is a sublime mixture of snugness and unnecessary inconvenience – and Winter watched with an abstracted eye the little huddle of gowns, umbrellas, and table-napkins sorting itself out in the porch. It was, he thought, rather like a congregation of magpies; of moulting magpies, he added – acknowledging to himself that he was in doubtful humour. In chapel Numbers xxxiii impromptu had not been a success. His delivery had been confident, even slightly bored. But Mummery, the Mods tutor and the acknowledged eccentric