The Babe, B.A. : being the uneventful history of a young gentleman at Cambridge University — John Shaqi
The Babe, B.A. : being the uneventful history of a young gentleman at Cambridge UniversityBenson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
General
The Babe, B.A. : being the uneventful history of a young gentleman at Cambridge University
Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
Cambridge (England) -- Fiction; College stories; College students -- Fiction; University of Cambridge -- Fiction
Those Fellows of colleges, who live in college are, for obvious
reasons, debarred from the matrimonial state, and should inspire
greater respect in reflective minds than almost any other class of
persons in this naughty world. For the most part they combine the
morality of married men with the innocence of ideal bachelors. Their
lives are for nine months or so of the year lived in the sequestered
shades of pious and ancient foundations, unspotted by the world. Those
who have relations fill their places in the domestic circle where
their absence has no doubt rendered them doubly dear, at Christmas and
Easter, or join those who have not, and pass their long vacation on the
lower slopes of the Alps, or at quiet little sea-side places; some of
them visit cathedrals during their unoccupied months, some the lakes,
few or none, London, or if London, chiefly the reading-room at the
British Museum. But there are exceptions to the most desirable rules,
and even among Fellows of colleges there are a few who are reported to
know “a thing or two.”
On Saturday night it often happened that Fellows of King’s asked their
colleagues from other colleges to dine with them. After dinner they
sat in the Combination Room for an hour or so, or they would break up
into parties, which spent the evening at one or other of the Fellows’
rooms, and indulged in the mild dissipation of whist at three-penny
points, which they seemed to find strangely exhilarating. One such
party adjourned directly after dinner to the room of the Dean, Mr.
Collins, who two hours before had remonstrated with Reggie for not
attending a larger percentage of early Chapels or their equivalent.
To undergraduates he was scholastic and austere, but among his own
contemporaries he not infrequently relaxed into positive playfulness.
Mr. Stewart, a history tutor from Trinity, was one of his guests
to-night, and Mr. Longridge, a Dean of the same college, another.
About Mr. Longridge, all that need be said at present is that in body
he was insignificant, and in mind, incoherent. But Mr. Stewart was a
more conspicuous person both bodily and mentally: he was in fact one of
the exceptions to the general run of his class, and he was credited,
by report at least, with knowing not only a thing or two, but lots of
things.
Just now, his long, languid form, attired altogether elegantly, was
spread over a considerable area of arm-chair, his feet rested on the
fender, and he was holding forth on certain subjects of the day, about
which he was perfectly qualified to speak. The man with the incoherent
mind was sitting near him, listening with ill-concealed impatience to
his sonorous periods, and getting in a word edgewise occasionally. Mr.
Collins was busy attending to the wants of his guests, and two of
his friends from the same college, were sitting together on the sofa,
resigned but replete.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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