when she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington
Manor. "How do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? Have
you joined that thing--the Union, is it?--and delivered your maiden
speech? If you're for politics, Poff, that's your game. Have you
begun it?"

She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt,
a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated
face warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like
little friendly heavens. And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful,
sat at her feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that
now at last they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted
if it would be possible ever to love any other woman so much as he
did her.

He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the
undergraduate life he was leading, but he found it difficult. All
sorts of things that seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of
drawing in the peculiar atmosphere she created about her. All sorts
of clumsiness and youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt
she wouldn't accept, couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her
to accept. Before they could come before her they must wear a
bravery. He couldn't, for instance, tell her how Billy Prothero,
renouncing vanity and all social pretension, had worn a straw hat
into November and the last stages of decay, and how it had been
burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court. He
couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and
high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours.
A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which
the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from