“Quite,” said Gav conclusively, and paid. And as the two friends strolled back towards their college, he explained to David how it had long been a principle with him always to exceed the authorized allowance of words.
He was that sort of person.
CHAPTER II
PLINTH
Next evening, steeped in the puce and russet dusk of an Oxford twilight, Gaveston sat meditatively enframed in his mullioned window. It was well-nigh the hour for his first dinner in his college Hall; already, from the insistent belfries of the remoter colleges the fateful seven strokes were shattering with their clangorous curfew the vespertinal peace of the entranced city.
But his mood was one of delicious recueillement. Unlike so many of his fellow-freshmen, whose savoir-faire was sadly to seek, Gaveston had donned neither dinner jacket nor tails, but over one shoulder of his well-cut Norfolk coat had negligently flung a simple but carefully torn commoner’s gown. He, of all men, could surely face sans apprehension the ordeal of a first public appearance in Wallace.
And the Wallace manner? But Gaveston had no need to worry over how best to acquire the famous manner, at once the jest and paragon of every cabinet since Balfour’s, of every chancellory from Berlin to Uganda. No, that far-flung triumph of the collegiate system was a stuff bred in the very marrow of the ffoulis’s bones. Why, only that morning he had been obliged to remind the President of the college of that fact. And he smiled as he recalled the trifling but significant incident—how the venerable scholar had peered up at him from his pile of matriculation papers.
“I … er … liked your essay, Mr. ffoulis,” he had said, with no doubt the kindliest of intentions, “very much. In fact I almost think … er … you were made for … er … Wallace.”
But Gav had replied with caustic courtesy.
“I almost think Wallace was made for me, sir.”