“Don’t talk rot!” grumbled Falloden, but he winked at her in brotherly fashion, and Trix was more than happy. Like her mother, she believed that Douglas was simply the handsomest and cleverest fellow in the world. When he scolded it was better than other people’s praise, and when he gave you a real private wink, it raised a sister to the skies. On such soil does male arrogance grow! Soon they were in the stream of people crossing Christ Church river on their way to the boats. The May sunshine lay broad on the buttercup meadows, on the Christ Church elms, on the severe and blackened front of Corpus, on the long gabled line of Merton. The river glittered in the distance, and towards it the crowd of its worshippers—young girls in white, young men in flannels, elderly fathers and mothers from a distance, and young fathers and mothers from the rising tutorial homes of Oxford—made their merry way. Falloden looked in all directions for the Hooper party. A new anxiety and eagerness were stirring in him which he resented, which he tried to put down. He did not wish, he did not intend, if he could help it, to be too much in love with anybody. He was jealous of his own self-control, and intensely proud of his own strength of will, as he might have been of a musical or artistic gift. It was his particular gift, and he would not have it weakened. He had seen men do the most idiotic things for love. He did not intend to do such things. Love should be strictly subordinate to a man’s career; women should be subordinate. At the same time, from the second week of their acquaintance on the Riviera, he had wished to marry Constance Bledlow. He had proposed to her, only to be promptly refused, and on one mad afternoon, in the woods of the Esterels, he had snatched a kiss. What an amazing fuss she made about that kiss! He thought she would have cut him for ever. It was with the greatest difficulty, and only after a grovelling apology, that he had succeeded in making his peace. Yet all through the days of her wrath he had been quite certain that he would in the end appease her; which meant a triumphant confidence on his part that to a degree she did not herself admit or understand, he had captured her. Her resolute refusal to correspond with him, even after they had made it up and he was on the point of returning to Oxford, had piqued him indeed. But he was aware that she was due at Oxford, as her uncle’s ward, some time in May; and meanwhile he had coolly impressed upon himself that in the interests of his work, it was infinitely better he should be without the excitement of her letters. By the time she arrived, he would have got through the rereading of his principal books, which a man must do in the last term before the schools, and could begin to “slack.” And after the schools, he could devote himself.