“IT’S NO GOOD TAKING ME TO ANY CLUB, DOURE, I’VE BEEN BLACK-BALLED FOR THE LOT.”

“I should imagine that would have happened—even in Oxford.”

AN HOUR LATER. AT THE CROWN.

Adam and Ernest are just finishing dinner; both show marked signs of intoxication.

The dining room at the Crown bears little resemblance to Adam’s epicurean dream. The walls, pathetically frescoed with views of Oxford, resound with the clattering of dirty plates. Swithin’s dinner party has just left, leaving the room immeasurably more quiet. The three women who up till now have been playing selections from Gilbert and Sullivan in the corner have finished work and begun eating their dinner. An undergraduate who has very grandly signed the bill is engaged in an argument with the manager. At a table near Adam’s three young men with gowns wound round their throats have settled themselves and ordered coffee and cream cakes; while they are waiting they discuss the Union elections.

Adam orders more double whiskies.

Ernest insists on sending a bottle of gin over to the party at the next table. It is rejected with some resentment, and soon they rise and go away.

Adam orders more double whiskies.

Ernest begins drawing a portrait of Adam on the tablecloth.

He entitles it “Le vin triste,” and, indeed, throughout dinner, Adam has been growing sadder and sadder as his guest has grown more happy. He drinks and orders more with a mechanical weariness.

At length, very unsteadily, they rise to go.

From now onwards the film becomes a series of fragmentary scenes interspersed among hundreds of feet of confusion.

“It’s going queer again, Ada. D’you think it’s meant to be like this?”

A public-house in the slums. Adam leans against the settee and pays for innumerable pints of beer for armies of ragged men. Ernest is engrossed in a heated altercation about birth control with a beggar whom he has just defeated at “darts.”