but linked together by common tastes and by a deep and bitter distaste
for their father's newspapers, which were many, and for their mother's
novels, which were more. These were, indeed, not fit for perusal at
Somerville and Balliol. The danger had been that Somerville and Balliol,
till they knew you well, should not know you knew it.

In their first year, the mother of Johnny and Jane ('Leila Yorke,' with
'Mrs. Potter' in brackets after it), had, after spending Eights Week at
Oxford, announced her intention of writing an Oxford novel. Oh God, Jane
had cried within herself, not that; anything but that; and firmly she
and Johnny had told her mother that already there were _Keddy_, and
_Sinister Street_, and _The Pearl_, and _The Girls of St. Ursula's_ (by
Annie S. Swan: 'After the races were over, the girls sculled their
college barge briskly down the river,'), and that, in short, the thing
had been done for good and all, and that was that.

Mrs. Potter still thought she would like to write an Oxford novel.
Because, after all, though there might be many already, none of them were
quite like the one she would write. She had tea with Jane in the
Somerville garden on Sunday, and though Jane did not ask any of her
friends to meet her (for they might have got put in) she saw them all
about, and thought what a nice novel they would make. Jane knew she was
thinking this, and said, 'They're very commonplace people,' in a
discouraging tone. 'Some of them,' Jane added, deserting her own
snobbishness, which was intellectual, for her mother's, which was social,
'are also common.'

'There must be very many,' said Mrs. Potter, looking through her
lorgnette at the garden of girls, 'who are neither.'