College stories; College students -- Fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Trinity College (University of Cambridge) -- Fiction
Peter travelled to Cambridge the same evening and put up at the "Bull."
After dinner he went out to make his first acquaintance with a
University town. It was a lovely April evening. The deep violet of
the twilight sky revealed the irregular roofs and towers of the old
buildings. There was a half foreign air about the clean paved streets
with the open rivulets running along the pavements. Peter walked up
King's Parade and viewed with awe the pile of the famous chapel of
King's, past the University Library and the Senate House, and the
modern pretentious façade of Caius College, conceived and executed in
the best Insurance office style of architecture, and into the narrow,
noisy little Trinity Street. The streets were full of men in caps and
gowns, and a few still in flannels and straw hats. Mr. Binney wondered
how these latter could walk along so unconcernedly when they might at
any corner run straight into the arms of a perambulating Proctor. He
was so imbued with the idea of himself as a budding undergraduate that
he half expected to be taken for one, and felt quite nervous when he
did meet a Proctor a little later on, lest he should be asked for his
name and college. He was a little disappointed when that functionary
passed him without comment, but so reverential were his feelings
towards one who held such high office in the University that he could
not refrain from taking off his hat to him, a salute which the Proctor
gravely returned, much to Mr. Binney's gratification. He would perhaps
have been less gratified if he had known that the great man, who was
not accustomed to receiving respectful greetings from middle-aged
gentlemen, took him for a subservient tradesman whose face he happened
to have forgotten.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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