'Respect for an ancient and picturesque seat of learning prevents me from bringing down the roof of Durham College, then,' Gillingham answered lightly, with a slight sneer for his friend's boyish enthusiasm. 'Besides, my dear boy, you wander from the subject. When the French farmer asked his barn-door fowls to decide with what sauce they would wish to be eaten, they held a meeting of their own in the barton-yard, and sent their spokesman to say, “If you please, M. le Propriétaire, we very much prefer _not_ to be eaten.”
“Mes amis,” said the farmer, “vous vous écartez de la question.” And that's your case, Faussett. The business before the house is the moral turpitude and mental obliquity of the man Plantagenet, who refuses--as he says, on conscientious grounds--to join the college wine-club. Now, I take that as an insult to a society of gentlemen.'
'What a lark it would be,' Faussett cried, 'if we were to get him up here just now, offer him some wine, to which he pretends he has a conscientious objection--unless somebody else pays for it--make him drink success to the cause of total abstinence, keep filling up his glass till we make him dead drunk, and then set him at the window in a paper cap to sing “John Barleycorn.”'
Gillingham's thin lip curled visibly. 'Your humour, my dear boy,' he said, patting Faussett on the back, 'is English--English--essentially English. It reminds me of Gilray. It lacks point and fineness. Your fun is like your neckties--loud, too loud! You must cultivate your mind (if any) by a diligent study of the best French models. I would recommend, for my part, as an efficient antidote, a chapter of De Maupassant and an ode of François Coppée's every night and morning.'
'But if Plantagenet's poor,' one more tolerant lad put in apologetically, 'it's natural enough, after all, he shouldn't want to join the club. It's precious expensive, you know, Gillingham. It runs into money.'
The Born Poet was all sweet reasonableness.
'To be poor, my dear Matthews,' he said, with a charming smile, turning round to the objector, 'as Beau Brummell remarked about a rent in one's coat, is an accident that may happen to any gentleman any day; but a patch, you must recognise, is premeditated poverty. The man Plan-tagenet may be as poor as he chooses, so far as I'm concerned; I approve of his being poor. What so picturesque, so affecting, so poetical, indeed, as honest poverty? But to pretend he doesn't _care_ for wine--that's quite another matter. There the atrocity comes in--the vulgarian atrocity. For I call such a statement nothing short of vulgar.' He raised his glass once more, and eyed the light of the lamp through the amethystine claret with poetic appreciation. 'Now give the hautboys breath,' he cried, breaking out once more in a fit of fine dithyrambic inspiration; 'he comes! he comes! Bacchus, ever fair and ever young, Drinking joys did first ordain. Bacchus' blessings are a treasure; Drinking is the soldier's pleasure. Rich the tr-r-reasure. Sweet the pleasure. Sweet is pleasure after pain.'