BEHIND the florid personality of Mr Harold Thump, other individuals advanced and retreated. There was that other student, young Frankincense from University College, who had won so many honours. He was slender and tall, surmounted by a pear-shaped head with the broad part upward, and he came to Edward Albert and said, “I gather you too are a scholarship holder?”

“Not exactly a scholarship holder,” said Edward Albert.

“I’m studying at the Imperial College of Commercial Science in Kentish Town. Civil Service and all that.”

“Oh God!” cried Mr Frankincense in undisguised contempt, and turned away, and never afterwards approached him.

Whereupon a profound hatred for Mr Frankincense was born in Edward Albert’s soul, and it troubled him profoundly that he could devise no way of getting square with him. In reveries he called him Turnip Head, and cut him out with a particularly beautiful but non-existent young lady, with whom he was desperately enamoured. In this Edward Albert’s new tailor-made suit played its part. But Frankincense paid little attention to these profound humiliations, since he knew nothing whatever about them.

Edward Albert would see him playing chess in the snuggery and particularly with the Indian young gentleman, who looked like one of the Bolter’s College Old Boys, only more so, and who spoke in a high-pitched clear staccato manner that filled Edward Albert with a strange sense of superiority, more particularly when he learnt from old Mr Blake that this way of talking was “chi-chi” and characteristic of the lesser breeds within the law who inhabit Hindustan. He was part of Edward Albert’s Indian Empire, and as for his being a somebody because he was a Rajah’s son, said old Mr Blake, “these rajahs have dozens of ’em. Hareems they have, and they tax the skins off their people to keep them up and then blame us for it. Four wives and a lot of concubines and then some. Rajah’s son he may be in India, but over here he’s not............