“Field Work. The aim of the course--I’m afraid I’m quoting Miss Stalk but I don’t mind, she’s really fine--is to break nature into its elements--”
“So as to view it as the external structure of Society and make deductions from it.”
“Oh, no”--she laughed--“I’m only starting the work this term. But, of course, I shall have to. Each girl makes at least one deduction at the end of the course. Some of the seniors make two or three. But you have to make _one_.”
“It’s a great course,” I said. “No wonder you are going to be busy; and, as you say, how much better than loafing round here doing nothing.”
“Isn’t it?” said the girl student with enthusiasm in her eyes. “It gives one such a sense of purpose, such a feeling of doing something.”
“Oh, goodness,” she exclaimed, “there’s the lunch bell. I must skip and get ready.”
She was just vanishing from my side when the Burly Male Student, who was also staying in the hotel, came puffing up after his five-mile run. He was getting himself into trim for enlistment, so he told me. He noted the retreating form of the college girl as he sat down.
“I’ve just been talking to her,” I said, “about her college work. She seems to be studying a queer lot of stuff--Social Endeavour and all that!”
“Awful piffle,” said the young man. “But the girls naturally run to all that sort of rot, you know.”
“Now, your work,” I went on, “is no doubt very different. I mean what you were taking before the war came along. I suppose you fellows have an awful dose of mathematics and philology and so on just as I did in my college days?”
Something like a blush came across the face of the handsome youth.
“Well, no,” he said, “I didn’t co-opt mathematics. At our college, you know, we co-opt two majors and two minors.”
“I see,” I said, “and what were you co-opting?”
“I co-opted Turkish, Music, and Religion,” he answered.
“Oh, yes,” I said with a sort of reverential respect, “fitting yourself for a position of choir-master in a Turkish cathedral, no doubt.”
“No, no,” he said, “I’m going into insurance; but, you see, those subjects fitted in better than anything else.”
“Yes. Turkish comes at nine, music at ten and religion at eleven. So they make a good combination; they leave a man free to--”