‘I could show you a good many if there were time,’ said young Sartoris, hardly knowing however what he was saying, so lost was he in admiration of that marvellous changing face.  ’The vacation is the time they show themselves; it’s like owls coming out at night.  You see, Miss Bretherton, we don’t keep many of them; they’re in the way in term time.  But in vacation they have the colleges and the parks and the Bodleian to themselves, and you may study their ways, and their spectacles, and their umbrellas, under the most favourable conditions.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Bretherton, with a little scorn, ’people always make fun of what they are proud of.  But I mean to believe that you are all learned, and that everybody here works himself to death, and that Oxford is quite, quite perfect!’

‘Did you hear what Miss Bretherton was saying, Mrs. Stuart?’ said Forbes, when they were seated at luncheon.  ’Oxford is perfect, she declares already; I don’t think I quite like it:  it’s too hot to last.’

‘Am I such a changeable creature, then?’ said Miss Bretherton, smiling at him.  ‘Do you generally find my enthusiasms cool down?’

‘You are as constant as you are kind,’ said Forbes, bowing to her; ’I am only like a child who sighs to see a pleasure nearing its highest point, lest there should be nothing so good afterwards.’

‘Nothing so good!’ she said, ’and I have only had one little drive through the streets.  Mr. Wallace, are you and Mrs. Stuart really going to forbid me sight-seeing?’

‘Of course!’ said Wallace emphatically.  ’That’s one of the fundamental rules of the society.  Our charter would be a dead letter if we let you enter a single college on your way to the river to-day.’

‘The only art, my dear Isabel,’ said Mrs. Stuart, ’that you will be allowed to study to-day, will be the art of conversation.’

‘And a most fatiguing one, too!’ exclaimed Forbes; ’it beats sight-seeing hollow.  But, my dear Miss Bretherton, Kendal and I will make it up to you.  We’ll give you an illustrated history of Oxford on the way to Nuneham.  I’ll do the pictures, and he shall do the letterpress.  Oh! the good times I’ve had up here—­much better than he ever had’—­nodding across at Kendal, who was listening.  ’He was too proper behaved to enjoy himself; he got all the right things, all the proper first-classes and prizes, poor fellow!  But, as for me, I used to scribble over my note-books all lecture-time, and amuse myself the rest of the day.  And then, you see, I was up twenty years earlier than he was, and the world was not as virtuous then as it is now, by a long way.’

Kendal was interrupting, when Forbes, who was in one of his maddest moods, turned round upon his chair to watch a figure passing along the quadrangle in front of the bay-window.

’I say, Sartoris, isn’t that Camden, the tutor who was turned out of Magdalen a year or two ago for that atheistical book of his, and whom you took in, as you do all the disreputables?  Ah, I knew it!