“I am not peevish, Agnes, but I have a full right to be. Pray, why did he not meet us? Why did he not provide rooms? And pray, why did you leave me to do all the settling? All the lodgings I knew are full, and our bedrooms look into a mews. I cannot help it. And then—look here! It really is too bad.” He held up his foot like a wounded dog. It was dripping with water. “Oho! This explains the peevishness. Off with it at once. It’ll be another of your colds.” “I really think I had better.” He sat down by the fire and daintily unlaced his boot. “I notice a great change in university tone. I can never remember swaggering three abreast along the pavement and charging inoffensive visitors into a gutter when I was an undergraduate. One of the men, too, wore an Eton tie. But the others, I should say, came from very queer schools, if they came from any schools at all.” Mr. Pembroke was nearly twenty years older than his sister, and had never been as handsome. But he was not at all the person to knock into a gutter, for though not in orders, he had the air of being on the verge of them, and his features, as well as his clothes, had the clerical cut. In his presence conversation became pure and colourless and full of understatements, and—just as if he was a real clergyman—neither men nor boys ever forgot that he was there. He had observed this, and it pleased him very much. His conscience permitted him to enter the Church whenever his profession, which was the scholastic, should demand it. “No gutter in the world’s as wet as this,” said Agnes, who had peeled off her brother’s sock, and was now toasting it at the embers on a pair of tongs. “Surely you know the running water by the edge of the Trumpington road? It’s turned on occasionally to clear away the refuse—a most primitive idea. When I was up we had a joke about it, and called it the ‘Pem.’” “How complimentary!” “You foolish girl,—not after me, of course. We called it the ‘Pem’ because it is close to Pembroke College. I remember—” He smiled a little, and twiddled his toes. Then he remembered the bedmaker, and said, “My sock is now dry. My sock, please.” “Your sock is sopping. No, you don’t!” She twitched the tongs away from him. Mrs. Aberdeen, without speaking, fetched a pair of Rickie’s socks and a pair of Rickie’s shoes. “Thank you; ah, thank you. I am sure Mr. Elliot would allow it.” Then he said in French to his sister, “Has there been the slightest sign of Frederick?” “Now, do call him Rickie, and talk English. I found him here. He had forgotten about us, and was very sorry. Now he’s gone to get some dinner, and I can’t think why he isn’t back.” Mrs. Aberdeen left them. “He wants pulling up sharply. There is nothing original in absent-mindedness. True originality lies elsewhere. Really, the lower classes have no _nous_. However can I wear such deformities?” For he had been madly trying to cram a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe.