The books and pictures were to go up next day; but even so the room was cheerful, and a wise, middle-aged man, whom Alix at first, in some bewilderment, took to be a professor lending himself to friendly offices, perhaps in some English ritual of self-effacement, brought in an excellent tea.
“He’s what we call a scout,” Giles, smiling, explained to her.
“Not a Boy Scout!” Alix exclaimed. It was very confusing, and Giles had to explain it further.
She and Mrs. Bradley slept that night at lodgings in the town and Alix made her first acquaintance with the English lodging-house bed. There was no sommier and the mattress seemed to be filled with potatoes. One wound oneself among the lumps and contrived at last to sleep.
They helped Giles with his books and pictures next morning, and in the afternoon he said he must show her Oxford while his mother shopped. It was raining. Giles had on a raincoat turned up about his ears, and so had she. She had never seen so many bicycles, and from under a dripping umbrella, after one had dodged them, she found the Gothic quadrangles and deep emerald gardens, the meditative swans gliding, at Worcester, on the water, and the mist-washed vistas of the High, all triste. She was depressed at the thought of leaving Giles behind in such a damp, crumbling place where it was, indeed, natural to think of philosophers drinking hemlock, and where only in the refuge of one’s own room with the wise scout to take care of one, might one find a sense of warmth and cheerfulness.
“You can’t very well imagine how jolly all this is on a fine day,” said Giles: “when the sun comes out, you know, and the distances are blue, and the stone golden, and the gardens full of flowers.”
He was sad, too, Alix felt, though he tried to speak cheerfully and the day was unbecoming to him as to everything else. He looked a gaunt, uncouth student, his nose projecting under his cap and his eyes making Alix think, in their meditative melancholy, of the swans. He would, of course, be missing Toppie.
“All the women wear velour hats of the same shape,” she observed as they made their way along the High. “All turn up behind and down in front. Now I would turn mine down behind and up in front—with a very slight curve to the side; the line is better. And for costumes tailleurs it is so needful that the skirt should hang evenly.”
“Is it?” said Giles with a gloomy grin. “I’m showing you the architecture, not the clothes of Oxford.”
“Are they all the wives of philosophers?” Alix inquired, and the question indubitably interested her more than the architecture.