The event proved her a true prophet. John, as became one who prized physical fitness, had been all his life a rather unusually abstemious young man. But on certain rare occasions dotted through the years of his sojourn at Oxford he had permitted himself to relax. As for instance, the night of his twenty-first birthday . . . Boat-Race night in his freshman year . . . and, perhaps most notable of all, the night of the University football match in the season when he had first found a place in the Oxford team and had helped to win one of the most spectacular games ever seen at Twickenham. To celebrate each of these events he had lapsed from his normal austerity, and every time had woken on the morrow to a world full of greyness and horror and sharp, shooting pains. But never had he experienced anything to compare with what he was feeling now. He was dimly conscious that strange things must have been happening to him, and that these things had ended by depositing him on a strange bed in a strange room, but he was at present in no condition to give his situation any sustained thought.
