CHAPTER XI. "A KIND OF YESTY COLLECTION." "So you are going in for culture," said Kerisen, sitting lightly on the arm of an easy-chair in Dale's lodgings at Oxford. He smiled as he said it—a smile pleasant in spite of mockery. "I am going to try to be less of a fool," said Dale, laughing. Since he reached England, Irvine had been in a mood unusually robust. Fresh from the brown hues of Tuscany and the level plains of France, he looked on the rounded hills and wooded valleys of England as on a new world. Everywhere was tender green under white fleecy clouds. All foreign parts seemed to his memory but glare and dust. The childhood of the year filled him with joy and hope. He, too, was a child. It should not be his fault if the man were not worth something. Thus it happened, that while his family believed that only some shreds of worldly wisdom and a special envoy had saved the youth from a rash marriage; while Miss Susan cherished the dear belief that he hid a broken heart beneath his feverish gaiety; while Ned himself kept watch anxiously on his cousin,-Mr Irvine Dale, with his thoughts bent on the future, and a fresh growth of hope in his heart, was intent on making himself a more complete man. He was at Oxford again, an undergraduate among undergraduates, but for the most part indifferent to their aims. He had but one thing to do, to cultivate himself into somebody worthy to live. "I don't think much of Oxford culture," observed Kerisen, who had won all sorts of university honours, and carried them lightly, and who was a non-resident fellow of an idle college. "I know what you will find it," he added: "Taylorian institute; hours in the Bodleian; walks round the parks; talks round the tea-table; discovery of lads of promise who listen to you, of lads of money who do up their rooms; the classical; the pseudo-classical; the Renaissance; the renascence; Gothic; Queen Ann; the Greek drama; the last burlesque in London; Antigone, and Polly Darvel. They don't do the thing well in Oxford." Dale only smiled tolerant of his friend's manner of speech, and Kerisen, as he got up to go, added, "I am up till Monday. Come and dine on Friday, and you shall meet the cream of the cultured. There will be about six men, and you can take one each day next week, and walk him round the parks." It was a chance not to be lost. Irvine accepted with gratitude. "I shall tell each man privately that you need his influence," said Kerisen, and so departed with a nod. Friday evening came, and Dale sought his friend's dinner-party with lively curiosity. They dined in the Little Common-room—an interesting party truly. There was Manvers, the Union orator, frowning at his soup as one who scorned the indulgence of the baser appetites. There was the young poet Farwood, slim of figure, with a habit of suddenly inflating his chest and pushing back his hay-coloured hair. Always inseparable, those two young dons Blossett of Christopher's and Jones of St James's were exchanging confidences about a fender. Young Cranley, with youthful eyes fixed on Kerisen, whom he reverenced as a model, was trying hard to seem as old as he really was. Finally, there was Blogg, who had read Voltaire. Heterodoxy, epigram, paradox, were child's |