forty.

In streamed the party, filling up the book-lined rooms and startling the
two old scouts in attendance into an unwonted rapidity of action. Miss
Bretherton wandered round, surveyed the familiar Oxford luncheon-table,
groaning under the time-honoured summer fare, the books, the engravings,
and the sunny, irregular quadrangle outside, with its rich adornings of
green, and threw herself down at last on to the low window-seat with a
sigh of satisfaction.

'How quiet you are! how peaceful! how delightful it must be to live here!
It seems as if one were in another world from London. Tell me what that
building is over there; it's too new, it ought to be old and gray like
the colleges we saw coming up here. Is everybody gone away--"gone down"
you say? I should like to see all the learned people walking about for
once.'

'I could show you a good many if there were time,' said young Sartoris,
hardly knowing however what he was saying, so lost was he in admiration
of that marvellous changing face. 'The vacation is the time they show
themselves; it's like owls coming out at night. You see, Miss Bretherton,
we don't keep many of them; they're in the way in term time. But in
vacation they have the colleges and the parks and the Bodleian to
themselves, and you may study their ways, and their spectacles, and their
umbrellas, under the most favourable conditions.'

'Oh yes,' said Miss Bretherton, with a little scorn, 'people always make
fun of what they are proud of. But I mean to believe that you are _all_
learned, and that everybody here works himself to death, and that Oxford
is quite, quite perfect!'