"Quite…" said Lord Kessler, who perhaps hadn't been sure of this fact. "You were contemporaries."

"Yes, we were, exactly," said Nick, and the word seemed to throw a historic light across the mere three years since he had first seen Toby in the porter's lodge and felt a sudden obliviousness of everything else.

"And you took a First?"

Nick loved the murmured challenging confidence of the question because he could answer "Yes." If it had been no, if he'd got a Second like Toby, he felt everything would have been different, and a lie would have been very ill-advised.

"And how do you rate my nephew's chances?" said Lord Kessler with a smile, though it wasn't clear to Nick what contest, what eventuality he was alluding to.

"I think he'll do very well," he said, smiling back, and feeling he had struck a very subtle register, of loyal affirmation hedged with allowable irony.

Lord Kessler weighed this for a moment. "And for you, what now?"

"I'm starting at UCL next month; doing graduate work in English."

"Ah… yes… " Lord Kessler's faint smile and tucked-in chin suggested an easily mastered disappointment. "And what is your chosen field?"

"Mm. I want to have a look at style," Nick said. This flashing emphasis on something surely ubiquitous had impressed the admissions board, though Lord Kessler appeared uncertain. A man who owned Mme de Pompadour's escritoire could hardly be indifferent to style, Nick felt; but his reply seemed to have in mind some old wisdom about style and substance.

"Style tout court?"

"Well, style at the turn of the century-Conrad, and Meredith, and Henry James, of course." It all sounded perfectly pointless, or at least a way of wasting two years, and Nick blushed because he really was interested in it and didn't yet know-not having done the research-what he was going to prove.