Outside in the High a tram rumbled slowly past. The clock struck ten from St. Mary’s tower. The wicker chair creaked comfortably. The watered silk of the rich bindings swished luxuriously. This was how Boccaccio should be read. Michael’s mind was filled with the imagination of that gay company, secluded from the fever, telling their gay stories in the sunlight of their garden. This was how Rabelais should be read: the very pages seemed to glitter like wine.
Midnight chimed from St. Mary’s tower. One by one the new books went gloriously to their gothic shelves. The red lamp was extinguished. Michael’s bedroom was scented with the breath of the October night. It was too cold to read more than a few sentences of Pater about some splendid bygone Florentine. Out snapped the electric light: the room was full of moonshine, so full that the water in the bath tub was gleaming.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST WEEK
The first two or three days were busy with interviews, initiations, addresses, and all the academic panoply which Oxford brings into action against her neophytes.
First of all, the Senior Tutor, Mr. Ardle, had to be visited. He was a deaf and hostile little man whose side-whiskers and twitching eyelid and manner of exaggerated respect toward undergraduates combined to give the impression that he regarded them as objectionable discords in an otherwise justly modulated existence.
Michael in his turn went up the stairs to Mr. Ardle’s room, knocked at the door and passed in at the don’s bidding to where he sat sighing amid heaps of papers and statistical sheets. The glacial air of the room was somehow increased by the photographs of Swiss mountains that crowded the walls.
“Mr.?” queried the Senior Tutor. “Oh, yes, Mr. Fane. St. James’. Your tutor will be the Dean—please sit down—the Dean, Mr. Ambrose. What school are you proposing to read?”
“History, I imagine,” said Michael. “History!” he repeated, as Mr. Ardle blinked at him.
“Yes,” said the Senior Tutor in accents of patient boredom. “But we have to consider the immediate future. I suggest Honor Moderations and Literæ Humaniores.”