'An engagement, father! You have an engagement! And in Oxford, too,' Dick faltered out. 'Why, how on earth can you have managed to pick up an engagement?' Mr. Plantagenet drew himself up as he was wont to do for the beginning of a quadrille, and, assuming an air of offended dignity, replied with much hauteur: 'I am not in the habit, Richard, of accounting for my engagements, good, bad, or indifferent, to my own children. I am of age, I fancy. Finding myself here at Oxford in a congenial society--in the society to which I may venture to say I was brought up, and of which, but for unfortunate circumstances, I ought always to have made a brilliant member--finding myself here in my natural surroundings, I repeat, I have, of course, _picked up_, as you coarsely put it, a few private acquaintances on my own account. I'm not so entirely dependent as you suppose upon you, Richard, for my introduction to Oxford society. My own personal qualities and characteristics, I hope, go a little way, at least, towards securing me respect and consideration in whatever social surroundings I may happen to be mixing.' And Mr. Plantagenet shook out a clean white cambric pocket-handkerchief ostentatiously, to wipe his eyes, in which a slight dew was supposed to have insensibly collected at the thought of Richard's unfilial depreciation of his qualities and opportunities. 'I'm sorry I've offended you, father,' Dick answered hastily. 'I'm sure I didn't mean to. But I do hope--I do hope--if you'll allow me to say so, you're not going round to spend the evening--at any other undergraduate's rooms--not at Gillingham's or Faussett's.' Mr. Plantagenet shuffled uneasily: in point of fact, he looked very much as he had been wont to look in days gone by, when the landlady at the White Horse inquired of him now and again how soon he intended to settle his little account for brandy-and-sodas. 'I choose my own acquaintances, Richard,' he answered, with as much dignity as he could easily command. I don't permit myself to be dictated to in matters like this by my own children. Your neighbour Mr. Faussett appears to me a very intelligent and gentlemanly young man: a young man such as I was accustomed to associate with myself in my own early days, before I married your poor dear mother: not like _your_ set, Richard, who are far from being what I myself consider thoroughly gentlemanly. Mere professional young men, your set, my dear boy: very worthy, no doubt, and hard-working, and respectable, like this excellent Gillespie; but not with that _cachet_, that indefinable something, that invisible hall-mark of true blood and breeding, that I observe with pleasure in your neighbour Faussett. It's not your fault, my poor boy: I recognise freely that it's not your fault. You take after your mother. She's a dear good soul, your mother'--pocket-handkerchief lightly applied again--'but she's not a Plantagenet, Richard: she's _not_ a Planta-genet.'