Next morning, or rather next noon, for it was noon before people woke after these balls that were not over until four o’clock, Michael looked out of his bedroom window with a sudden dismay at the great elms of the deer park, deep-bosomed, verdurous, entranced beneath the June sky. “This is the last whole day,” he said, “the last day when I shall have a night at the end of it; and it’s going to be absolutely wasted at a picnic with all these women.” Michael scarcely knew how to tolerate that picnic, and wondered resentfully why everybody else seemed to enjoy it so much. “Delicious life,” said his mother, as he punted her away from the tinkling crowd on the bank. “I’m not surprised you like Oxford, dear Michael.” “I like it—I liked it, I mean, very much more when it was altogether different from this sort of thing. The great point of Oxford—in fact, the whole point of Oxford—is that there are no girls.” “How charmingly savage you are, dear boy,” said his mother. “And how absurd to pretend you don’t care for girls.” “But I don’t,” he asserted. “In Oxford I actually dislike them very much. They’re out of place except in Banbury Road. Dons should never have been allowed to marry. Really, mother, women in Oxford are wrong.” “Of course, I can’t argue with you. But there seem to me to be a great many of them.” “Great scott, you don’t think it’s like this in term-time, do you?” “Isn’t it?” said Mrs. Fane, apparently very much surprised. “I thought undergraduates were so famously susceptible. I’m sure they are, too.” “Do you mean to say you really thought this Commem herd was always roaming about Oxford?” “Michael, your Oxford expressions are utterly unintelligible to me.” “Don’t you realize you are up here for Commem—for Commemoration?” he asked. “How wonderful!” she said. “Don’t tell me any more. It’s so romantic, to be told one is ‘up’ for something.” Michael began to laugh, and the irritation of seeing the peaceful banks of the upper river dappled with feminine forms, so that everywhere the cattle had moved away to browse in the remote corners of the meadows, vanished.