Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

“I’ve seen many a man ruined through having ground-floor rooms in the front quad,”

My cousin Jasper had told me that it was normal to spend one’s second year shaking off the friends of one’s first, and it happened as he said.

But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

The toast will be along in a minute. They’re keeping it hot.” “Toast!” said my wife, as though this was something beyond the dreams of gluttony. “Do you hear that, Charles? Toast.”

There was a little heraldic chair by the chimney-piece, one of a set which stood against the walls, a little, inhospitable, flat-seated thing, a mere excuse for the elaborate armorial painting on its back, on which, perhaps, no one, not even a weary footman, had ever sat since it was made; there Lord Marchmain sat and wiped his eyes.