College stories; College students -- Fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Trinity College (University of Cambridge) -- Fiction
But the hour strikes and everything is changed. Men in gowns of blue
or black, with note-books under their arms, come pouring out of the
lecture-rooms into the court. Interspersed with them are the
lecturers, laden with books, their long gowns and ribbons flying; and
most curious of all, little groups of girls stand about the court
waiting until it is time for another lecturer to appear and dart
hurriedly into the room where his wisdom is to keep them entranced for
the next hour. How horrified our grandfathers would have been could
they have pictured girls and men sitting in the same lecture-room
to-day, and how incredulous, could they have been told what a very
little difference such an unforeseen arrangement would make in the
daily life of their colleges. For the women are already in Cambridge.
They have their own colleges, and if they have not yet their own
lecturers, they make very good use of ours. And, strange to say,
nobody takes much notice of them, or realises that they are there at
all, except when they form their little groups round the college
doorways, or when their names are read out before those of the men in
the Senate House, or when they want something which Cambridge with all
its chivalry is not quite prepared to give them.
One such little group of girls was standing by the Trinity Chapel one
bright November morning in the first term of Lucius's second year,
waiting for the learned gentleman who was to lecture to them during the
next hour on some subject connected with the Classical Tripos. The
learned gentleman was a little late and all the other lecturers had by
this time penned their flocks and were busily engaged in feeding, and
in some cases shearing them. The men who were booked for the same
lecture as the girls were standing in twos and threes a little distance
away, or strolling up and down the flagged pathways. At ten minutes
past the hour the lecturer was seen approaching at a hurried pace from
the direction of Neville's Court, and a minute later, girls, men, and
lecturer had disappeared, and the Great Court had settled down again to
its normal morning condition of dignified calm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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