Undergraduates, too, are more in evidence than on other days. On most mornings they either stay indoors, to work or sleep, or else go outside the college altogether. "Loitering" in the courts is not encouraged by the authorities. Not that the undergraduate minds that; but it will probably cost him half-a-crown every time he does so, not because he loiters but because he smokes.
The Old Court of St. Benedict's College—it is hardly necessary to say that we are in Cambridge and not in Oxford: otherwise we should have said "Quad"—presents to us on the present occasion a very fair sample of a Saturday morning crowd. The observant eye of the Dean, looking down (like Jezebel) from an upper chamber, can discern—
1. Three washerwomen, with the appurtenances thereof.
2. One small boy delivering The Granta.
3. A solitary spectacled gentleman, of the type described by the University Calendar in stately periphrasis as "A Native of Asia, not of European Parentage" (but more tersely classified by the rest of the community as "a nigger"), hurrying in cap and gown to secure a good place at the feet of some out-of-college Gamaliel.
4. A kitchen-man in white jacket and apron, bearing upon his head a tray containing a salmon mayonnaise, cutlets in aspic, and a special Cambridge dainty known as "Grassy Corner Pudding"—a fearsome compound of whipped cream and pistachio nuts.
5. A Buttery boy, walking close behind, with a basket containing bottles. Evidently some young gentleman is about to entertain angels—unawares so far as his bill-paying papa is concerned.
6. Four young men converging to a group in the centre of the court. Of these, two are attired in the undergraduate mode of the moment—tweed jackets with leather buttons, waistcoats of the Urim and Thummim variety, grey flannel trousers well turned up, clamorous silk socks, and heavy Highland shooting brogues. The third wears what the College Regulations describe rather ingenuously as "Athletic Dress." Pheidippides himself would have found it difficult to perform feats of prowess in a costume composed of split pumps, white duck trousers, and a blazer admirably qualified to serve as a model of the Solar Spectrum.
It may be mentioned in passing that, to the College Regulations, "Athletic Dress" is not in itself a costume in which it is possible to perform athletic feats, but one whose colour-scheme clashes with the sub-fusc standard which obtains in all college courts until one P.M.; such, in fact, as would tend to distract the eye and sap the diligence of those who traverse the courts on their way to lectures. In consequence, he who would be matutinally athletic must either keep his warpaint somewhere out of college, or drape himself like a stage conspirator as he flits from his rooms to the river or Fenner's.
The fourth gentleman of the party was dressed, if not gorgeously, sufficiently respectably to warrant the assumption that he was not a member of the University.