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!' 'Did you hear what Miss Bretherton was saying, Mrs. Stuart?' said Forbes, when they were seated at luncheon. 'Oxford is perfect, she declares already; I don't think I quite like it: it's too hot to last.' 'Am I such a changeable creature, then?' said Miss Bretherton, smiling at him. 'Do you generally find my enthusiasms cool down?' 'You are as constant as you are kind,' said Forbes, bowing to her; 'I am only like a child who sighs to see a pleasure nearing its highest point, lest there should be nothing so good afterwards.' 'Nothing so good!' she said, 'and I have only had one little drive through the streets. Mr. Wallace, are you and Mrs. Stuart really going to forbid me sight-seeing?' 'Of course!' said Wallace emphatically. 'That's one of the fundamental rules of the society. Our charter would be a dead letter if we let you enter a single college on your way to the river to-day.' 'The only art, my dear Isabel,' said Mrs. Stuart, 'that you will be allowed to study to-day, will be the art of conversation.'