Hurrying through the crowd of students and newspaper-boys at the lodge just before six o’clock, he met three friends, and the usual expressions of mutual surprise were uttered. They agreed to make up a mess together, and certainly would not have accepted the definition of a mess as “a party of four who eye each other with feelings of mutual distrust and suspicion.” Frank, as freshman, had to “stand” the orthodox bottle of wine, and felt quite like an old fogey as he “took wine” with the three. With the exception of wine, and the power of sending for various sorts of liquors, the dinner was very much the same as the usual dinner in Hall at Oxford. The servants were better dressed, but waited worse. There was more order, from the fact that everybody has to be present at grace before and after meat, failing which, the dinner does not count. Then the diversity of age and style of men struck Frank. Old men and beardless boys sitting side by side, wearing the student’s gown; mild-looking students with pale faces and spectacles; fast men, in whom the notion of study seemed a ridiculous anomaly; dark faces from the East; and even a few of the thick lips from Africa. All the rest--the Benchers at the high table, the portraits overhead, the coloured windows, the fretted roof, the carved panelling--it was all familiar; Oxford over again, simply transplanted to the very heart of London. After dinner they went to a theatre, and after that Frank was initiated into the mysteries of Evans’s. The three evenings passed all too quickly, and he was once more in Oxford, with the sense of having at least made one distinct step towards winning Rose, even though it was such a matter-of-fact affair as the eating of three dinners. There was not much to mark the succeeding Lent Term. There were the “Torpids” as usual, in which Frank again rowed, and with such decided improvement that he was considered safe for the “Eight” in the summer term. There was the ordinary scarlet-fever scare; a suicide of a studious undergraduate, the annual result of the climate, and the Lenten depression of the social atmosphere; and there were the Christ-Church Grinds,[12] and the Brasenose Ale Festival on Shrove Tuesday. To the former Frank went, surreptitiously of course, for the Grinds are with annual regularity forbidden, but with equal regularity carried out. The Proctors for the time being were not over-sharp, and imagined that the simplest and easiest way to catch the men coming home from Aylesbury was to go to the station and meet the in-trains. But, strange to relate, not a single undergraduate was to be found! Innocently confessing his failure on the following evening in Common Room, the Senior Proctor drew upon himself the ridicule of one of the older fellows, a sporting man, and the “inextinguishable laughter” of the rest.