Only one face in the company was in the least familiar to Edwin: that of a ponderous young man with immaculate black hair carefully parted in the middle, who had sat stolidly through the Astill Exhibition examination a few desks away from him. As he did not appear to be anxious to recognise this fact, Edwin abandoned his own intention of doing so, and, like the rest of the company, possessed his soul in silence. In the meantime he watched the others with a good deal of interest and speculation.
They were a strangely mixed company: a few of them, of whom Edwin himself was one, mere boys, to whom the air of the schoolroom still clung: some obvious men of the world, scrupulously, even doggily dressed, in an age when the fancy waistcoat had reached the zenith of its daring; others, and one other in particular, a seedy looking person with a dejected fair moustache, were clearly old enough to be the fathers of the youngest. It was to the second of these classes, the bloods, that Edwin found his attention attracted, and particularly to a paragon of elegance, whose waistcoat was the orange colour of a blackbird’s bill with light blue enamelled buttons, whose hair was mathematically bisected and shone with expensive unguents, and whose chin differed from that of Edwin in being shaved from sheer necessity instead of from motives of encouragement.
This person exuded an atmosphere of prosperity and style that took Edwin’s fancy immensely, and he wore grey flannel trousers as correctly turned up as any that Edwin had seen upon the enchanted platform of the station at Oxford. It was evident that the process of waiting bored him; for he took out of the pocket of the amazing waistcoat a gold hunter watch with a front enamelled in the same shade of light blue. The lid flicked open noiselessly when he touched a spring, and Edwin began to be exercised in his mind as to what happened when he put on a waistcoat of a different pattern, as obviously a person of this degree of magnificence must frequently do. Did he change the buttons, or did he change the watch? Edwin, surveying him, looked unconsciously at his own Waterbury; and, as he did so, the magnificent creature glanced at him with a pair of savage brown eyes, and, as Edwin decided, summed him up for good and all.