The Reverend Arthur Collingham Berkeley, curate of St. Fredegond's,
lounged lazily in his own neatly padded wickerwork easy-chair,
opposite the large lattice-paned windows of his pretty little
first-floor rooms in the front quad of Magdalen.

'There's a great deal to be said, Le Breton, in favour of October
term,' he observed, in his soft, musical voice, as he gazed pensively
across the central grass-plot to the crimson drapery of the Founder's
Tower. 'Just look at that magnificent Virginia creeper over there,
now; just look at the way the red on it melts imperceptibly into
Tyrian purple and cloth of gold! Isn't that in itself argument
enough to fling at Hartmann's head, if he ventured to come here
sprinkling about his heresies, with his affected little spray-shooter,
in the midst of a drowsy Oxford autumn? The Cardinal never saw
Virginia creeper, I suppose; a man of his taste wouldn't have been
guilty of committing such a gross practical anachronism as that,
any more than he would have smoked a cigarette before tobacco was
invented; but if only he could have seen the October effect on that
tower yonder, he'd have acknowledged that his own hat and robe were
positively nowhere in the running, for colour, wouldn't he?'

'Well,' answered Herbert, putting down the Venetian glass goblet
he had been examining closely with due care into its niche in the
over-mantel, 'I've no doubt Wolsey had too much historical sense
ever to step entirely out of his own century, like my brother Ernest,
for instance; but I've never heard his opinion on the subject of
colour-harmonies, and I should suspect it of having been distinctly
tinged with nascent symptoms of renaissance vulgarity. This is a
lovely bit of Venetian, really, Berkeley. How the dickens do you
manage to pick up all these pretty things, I wonder? Why can't I