He kept smiling as he moved about, but he really felt rather shy and alien; if he only knew more people, and could be seen laughing and talking and moving his hands, like the other young men! He came across one of his pupils at last, and began to speak to him of the recent boat-races in an animated way. But the undergraduate moved off suddenly, with a hasty excuse, to join some ladies who had just arrived, and Craik heard himself observing to a bush that "Brazenose had rowed very well." The observation, he felt, was not brilliant, even for conversation with a freshman; but as a fragment of soliloquy! He looked round; no one could have overheard him? Soon he met his friend, Mrs. Cotton, the wife of Professor Cotton, and he begged to be allowed to get her an ice, or some other refreshment. The pink ice and biscuit were inadequate, it struck him, as he carried them with care toward the large presence of Mrs. Cotton; but was not this inadequacy, after all, of a piece with the delicious and conventional unreality of an affair like this? He noticed a brilliant purple feather conspicuously waving from the top of Mrs. Cotton's bonnet, and was glad that everything was so bright. How pleasant it was on a summer day, how pleasant and harmless to play brilliantly at life! And, he thought with a smile, did not old Aristotle himself place Magnificence high among the virtues? But Maple Fetters still had his anxious eye-glass fixed on the garden entrance. "Miss Lamb--has Miss Lamb come?" Craik heard voices murmuring about him. "No, not yet, but she's coming. Just heard Maple Fetters telling some one." "Long says he can't understand it. In her note she said--" "So quiet, so different!" "They say in London--" "Oh, yes; and here everybody, Professors, Heads of Houses. It's too amusing--" "Well, she says she wants to study all the types." "Ah, look, there she comes!" Craik turned with the others, and saw Miss Lamb coming in through the Gothic archway. Her face was shaded with a large white hat, and her white dress, falling in long plain lines to her feet, brightened with the sun as she walked over the grass, out of the shadow of the building. Long and Maple Fetters started forward, and escorted Miss Lamb and her aunt across the lawn. They drew near to Craik and Mrs. Cotton. "Oh, there is Mrs. Cotton," Miss Lamb exclaimed, and turned towards them. "Dear Mrs. Cotton," she said, "I was so hoping I should see you here!" Craik looked at Miss Lamb. She rested her eyes on him for a second, then pressing Mrs. Cotton's hand, she stooped down with a graceful impulse and kissed the fat old thing. Craik overheard Mrs. Lyon, the wife of the president of All Saints, talking to the Warden of St. Simon's. "Dear Miss Lamb!" she said in a deep and sentimental voice; "she is just as nice to women as she is to men." "She is much nicer, surely," the ancient Warden replied with a cackling laugh; "she never kissed me!"