“Oh, but that’s quite different. You can’t say that I was ever the least like a Johnny. I never had the courage. Fancy being as brave as they are, and oh, fancy deliberately sitting down and taking all the stuffing out of your cap in order to be a blood!”
“I’ll take yours out, if you’ll take mine, Babe. There’s the bell. We must go in again.”
The Babe went to see Stewart when he went back to Trinity. The latter thoroughly approved of his holiday.
“You are giving yourself a little space,” he said, “in which it may be hoped you will forget, or rather assimilate, a few of the useless and ugly things which our system of examinations has compelled you to learn. A historian is not a person who knows masses of facts and dates, but a man who has built a structure upon them. The facts are the scaffold, which disappears when the house is built. And the tripos turns out a quantity of promising young men who can only build scaffolds. I wish I was examining. There should be no questions with dates in them, and they should all begin “Trace the tendency,” or “Indicate in a great many words the influence.”
“I wish I felt more certain about my scaffold.”
“My dear Babe, don’t vex your soul. Possess it in peace. I would give long odds on your getting through. What I did not expect was that you should have taken the distasteful steps that lead to so immaterial a result. You got a second in your last May’s didn’t you? Do let us talk of something a little more interesting than triposes.”
“Well, I didn’t introduce the subject,” said the Babe.
“What have you been doing this evening?”
“I’ve just been to the Second Mrs. Tanqueray with Reggie.”
“An interesting medical case,” remarked Stewart. “I believe the author consulted an eminent nerve doctor, as to how many months’ living with Aubrey Tanqueray would drive an excitable female to suicide. He thought six, but as the author wished her to do it in less, he had to introduce other incentives. Aubrey Tanqueray would drive me to madness in a week, and to suicide in eight days. He handed her toast at the scene at breakfast, as if he was giving her a slice of some cardinal virtue with the blessing of the Pope spread on it like butter. The real motif of the play, though the British public haven’t known it, is her growing despair at being wedded to him, and the immediate cause is the Second Mr. Tanqueray’s noble forgiveness of her when she was found to have tampered with the letter bag. He treated her like a candidate for confirmation, instead of boxing her ears, and said that the incident only served to draw them closer together, or something of the kind. Apparently if you commit a sufficiently mean action towards a person who really loves you, he will be delighted, and love you the more for it. It sounds a little Jesuitical, baldly stated. Who wrote the play? Pinero wasn’t it. Pinero is obviously the future from ‘Pinsum,’ I am a pin.”