"You don't know my governor," said Lucius, his depression very little lightened by Dizzy's narrative. "He's been at it for nearly a year now, grinding like a galley slave. That fellow Minshull must have got something into his head by this time. And after all the entrance exam isn't anything very big, is it?"
"Not to us; we're educated men," said Dizzy, who was a member of Trinity Hall, where the entrance examination is tempered to the shorn Trinity candidate. "But it's the devil and all to people like your old governor who ain't used to that sort of thing. He won't pass, Lucy; don't you be afraid of it."
"It's too bad of him wanting to come up, isn't it, Dizzy?" said poor Lucius, who yearned for sympathy and could only obtain it from this one particular friend.
"It is too bad," said Dizzy. "I don't know what governors are coming to. There's mine wrote to me the other day and said I was disgracing the family name, just because I turned out those lights in St. Andrew's Street and got hauled up at the police court for it. I told him I did it entirely to save the ratepayers' money. He's always talking about the enormous fiscal burdens he's got to bear, or some such tommy-rot, and I thought that would please him. But not a bit of it. Governors never listen to reason. I got eight pages back with a lot more about the family name. Hang it, it ain't much of a name after all."
It was not. It was Stubbs. But General Sir Richard Stubbs, V.C., had done his little best to adorn it in days gone by and saw no great probability of his son Benjamin doing the same in days to come.
The account Lucius gave at home of his doings fired Mr. Binney's imagination.
"Splendid, my boy, splendid!" cried the little man, when he described the two bumps which the Third Trinity boat had made in the Lent races. "I shall go in for rowing myself; best exercise you can have," and Mr. Binney drew himself up and struck the place where his chest would have been if he had had one. "Is it likely, do you think, Lucius, that you and I will row in the same boat?"
"It's not only unlikely," said Lucius shortly, "it's impossible."
"Oh, indeed," said Mr. Binney, with a dangerous gleam in his eye. "You are such a swell I suppose, that nobody else can expect to come near you."
"You wouldn't even belong to the same boat-club," said Lucius. "You ought to know that by this time. Third Trinity is only for Eton and Westminster men, the rest of the college belongs to First Trinity."