“It was by this circle that I found myself adopted during my first term; they provided the kind of company I had enjoyed in the sixth form at school, for which the sixth form had prepared me; but even in the earliest days, when the whole business of living at Oxford, with rooms of my own and my own cheque book, was a source of excitement, I felt at heart that this was not all that Oxford had to offer.”
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In Mad World, Paula Byrne writes:
For his first two terms he [EW] led a quiet anf uneventful life. He claimed that he was content: ‘I have enough friends to keep me from being lonely and not enough to bother me’, he wrote in a letter, adding that he did little work and dreamed a lot. But in other letters he lamented the lack of congenial friends.