She had pictured sunshine and a blue sky, and the lilacs in the hedge budding, and the daffodils blowing beneath the windows. It was the middle of April, and she had a right to expect these things; it was very little to expect.
It had been raining cheerfully all the morning, and it was raining still when the hansom drew up at the gate of St. Benedict's; it couldn't draw up at the door of the lodge, because college lodges are cut off from the outside world by cloistered courts, and even royalty, when it visits the master of a college, has to leave its carriage at the gate and perform the rest of the journey on foot.
Lucy met Mr. Colville in the cloisters as she was hurrying through, and he put her into the hansom, and he told the man where to drive, and quite a crowd of undergraduates, who had come up early in the term, stood round the gate watching her drive away.
It was quite a new thing, a girl going from St. Benedict's to Newnham. It was the newest thing under the sun. No daughter, niece or granddaughter of any Master of St. Benedict's had ever driven from those gates before to Newnham.
Perhaps when there is a mixed University, and a female president at the lodge, they will not have to go so far; they may find rooms beneath the same roof.
Who shall say?
Lucy couldn't have driven away with more depressing surroundings. The sky couldn't have been grayer, and the trees were shivering overhead, and the hedges were dripping, and there was a nasty mist settling down over everything. She forgot all about the lilacs and the daffodils she had been picturing as she stood, a forlorn little black figure, in the big, cheerless vestibule of Newe Hall, paying the driver of the hansom. There was no one at Newnham to receive her, no one to show her to her room, only a housemaid, who went away directly she reached the door. She didn't even open the door of the room; she only pointed to it and went away in another direction.
It was a little bare room, it couldn't have been barer. There was a couch that served for a bed, a bureau with some drawers beneath, a table, a couple of chairs, and a thinly disguised washstand with imperfect crockery; and that was all. Unless, indeed, a chintz curtain drawn across a corner of the room for hanging gowns behind could be called a wardrobe.
There was no fire, and the barred windows were steaming and blurred with the mist outside, and the raw spring afternoon was closing in.
Lucy shivered and looked round the desolate room. She didn't know what she was expected to do next, or how she was to begin this new life. She was a member of the University now, she told herself with bated breath; she was really a female undergraduate, and she had got to begin as undergraduates began.