"If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again," she wrote, and thought she had said a very original thing. "I always found, when I was a young lady at school, that if I couldn't master my tasks immediately, the only thing for it was, not to give them up, but to determine that I would master them in time; and my mistress, Miss Dolby—now an angel—used frequently to point me out to the parents of other pupils, and say, 'That child has great determination, and will undoubtedly make her mark.' I am aware that I have not fulfilled Miss Dolby's prophecy up to present date, but your triumphs are mine, Peter, and I trust that we shall both grow famous together."
Mr. Binney was much encouraged by Mrs. Higginbotham's letter. He took a holiday and went to Torquay, and by the time Lucius went up to Cambridge early in October, very much relieved at the idea of at least one year free from the companionship of his father as a fellow undergraduate, he had settled down for a hard winter's work in Russell Square.
CHAPTER IV
NO HELP TO BE GAINED FROM MRS. HIGGINBOTHAM
Lucius Binney enjoyed his first year at Cambridge exceedingly. He had been popular at school and he was very much liked at the University. He did enough work to enable him to avoid friction with the authorities and passed both parts of his Littlego in his first term. He rowed in the Trial Eights, but as he was not heavy enough to fill any place but bow in a University boat, a place which was adequately filled already, he did not get his Blue. His allowance enabled him to play his part in the hospitalities of University life with credit, and he showed no disposition to exceed it. He was made a member of the historic Amateur Dramatic Club, commonly known as the A.D.C., and played the part of a maid-servant in the first performances of his year on the most approved principles of Cambridge dramatic art, with a slim waist, a high colour, and an unmistakably masculine voice. He would have been one of the happiest men in the University if he had not been continually haunted by the thought of his father.
But for some reason or other Mr. Binney, although he insisted upon lengthy letters being written to him, giving the fullest possible account of University matters, expressed no intention of paying him a visit, as Lucius lived in continual fear of his doing. Perhaps he was ashamed of his inability to pass the entrance examination after having made certain of doing so; perhaps he preferred to make his first appearance amongst Cambridge men as an undergraduate and not as the guest of an undergraduate. At any rate he left Lucius unmolested during his first two terms, but his letters became more and more jubilant as he worked on at his examination subjects, and felt himself getting nearer the desired goal.
Lucius had a friend called Dizzy. His name was not really Dizzy, but it is only fair to state that he had been christened Benjamin. To him alone, of all his friends, Lucius had disclosed, under a solemn promise of secrecy, the dark fate that was hanging over him.
"He'll pass this time, Dizzy, I know he will," said Lucius, after receiving a more than usually confident letter from his father, who informed him that Minshull had told him that his Latin prose was, at last, beginning to show signs of an elementary grasp of the fact that there was such a thing as Latin grammar.
"Not he," said Dizzy with complete confidence. "He'll never pass. I knew an old geezer—no offence to your governor, Lucy—who first took up Latin when his little boys were seven and eight, under a governess. First week they were all three about equal. Then the eldest boy began to forge ahead. In a fortnight the little one left the old man behind, and after a month the governess said she'd have to go if he didn't do her more credit. He didn't want that, so he married her, which was what he'd been after all along, only hadn't liked to say so. They can't learn things at that time of life, my boy, any more than we can make a pot of money by winking at a fellow on the Stock Exchange. It's not in 'em."