College stories; College students -- Fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Trinity College (University of Cambridge) -- Fiction
Lucius Binney enjoyed his first year at Cambridge exceedingly. He had
been popular at school and he was very much liked at the University.
He did enough work to enable him to avoid friction with the authorities
and passed both parts of his Littlego in his first term. He rowed in
the Trial Eights, but as he was not heavy enough to fill any place but
bow in a University boat, a place which was adequately filled already,
he did not get his Blue. His allowance enabled him to play his part in
the hospitalities of University life with credit, and he showed no
disposition to exceed it. He was made a member of the historic Amateur
Dramatic Club, commonly known as the A.D.C., and played the part of a
maid-servant in the first performances of his year on the most approved
principles of Cambridge dramatic art, with a slim waist, a high colour,
and an unmistakably masculine voice. He would have been one of the
happiest men in the University if he had not been continually haunted
by the thought of his father.
But for some reason or other Mr. Binney, although he insisted upon
lengthy letters being written to him, giving the fullest possible
account of University matters, expressed no intention of paying him a
visit, as Lucius lived in continual fear of his doing. Perhaps he was
ashamed of his inability to pass the entrance examination after having
made certain of doing so; perhaps he preferred to make his first
appearance amongst Cambridge men as an undergraduate and not as the
guest of an undergraduate. At any rate he left Lucius unmolested
during his first two terms, but his letters became more and more
jubilant as he worked on at his examination subjects, and felt himself
getting nearer the desired goal.
Lucius had a friend called Dizzy. His name was not really Dizzy, but
it is only fair to state that he had been christened Benjamin. To him
alone, of all his friends, Lucius had disclosed, under a solemn promise
of secrecy, the dark fate that was hanging over him.
"He'll pass this time, Dizzy, I know he will," said Lucius, after
receiving a more than usually confident letter from his father, who
informed him that Minshull had told him that his Latin prose was, at
last, beginning to show signs of an elementary grasp of the fact that
there was such a thing as Latin grammar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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