“Delicious life,” said his mother, as he punted her away from the tinkling crowd on the bank. “I’m not surprised you like Oxford, dear Michael.”
“I like it—I liked it, I mean, very much more when it was altogether different from this sort of thing. The great point of Oxford—in fact, the whole point of Oxford—is that there are no girls.”
“How charmingly savage you are, dear boy,” said his mother. “And how absurd to pretend you don’t care for girls.”
“But I don’t,” he asserted. “In Oxford I actually dislike them very much. They’re out of place except in Banbury Road. Dons should never have been allowed to marry. Really, mother, women in Oxford are wrong.”
“Of course, I can’t argue with you. But there seem to me to be a great many of them.”
“Great scott, you don’t think it’s like this in term-time, do you?”
“Isn’t it?” said Mrs. Fane, apparently very much surprised. “I thought undergraduates were so famously susceptible. I’m sure they are, too.”
“Do you mean to say you really thought this Commem herd was always roaming about Oxford?”
“Michael, your Oxford expressions are utterly unintelligible to me.”
“Don’t you realize you are up here for Commem—for Commemoration?” he asked.
“How wonderful!” she said. “Don’t tell me any more. It’s so romantic, to be told one is ‘up’ for something.”
Michael began to laugh, and the irritation of seeing the peaceful banks of the upper river dappled with feminine forms, so that everywhere the cattle had moved away to browse in the remote corners of the meadows, vanished.
The ball at Christ Church seemed likely to be the most successful and to be the one that would remain longest in the memories of those who had taken part in this Commemoration. Nowhere could an arbiter of pleasure have found so perfect a site for his most elaborate entertainment. There was something very strangely romantic in this gay assembly dancing in the great hall of the House, so that along the cloisters sounded the unfamiliar noise of fiddles; but what gave principally the quality of romance and strangeness was that beyond the music, beyond the fantastically brilliant hall, stretched all around the dark quadrangles deserted now save where about their glooms dresses indeterminate as moths were here and there visible. The decrescent moon would scarcely survive the dawn, and meanwhile there would be darkness everywhere away from the golden heart of the dance in that great hall spinning with light and motion.