"Well, seriously," John Berrisford continued, when his glass had been filled again, "to move would be fatal, because the traditions would all go if you took them away from their home. But it's the traditions that count, not the place. God knows I'm willing enough to be sentimental about places. I can even enjoy hearing the song about 'Devon, glorious Devon,' sung by a Dandy Coon baritone at an audience of Cockneys at Teignmouth. I can understand a Scottish exile in America going a hundred miles to hear Harry Lauder. To my mind places are the only things about which a man has a right to be sentimental. No causes or catch-words for me: but hills and valleys—as much as you like. That's Nationalism, and therefore Liberalism, Cartmell."
"I agree!"
"You don't, but I'll take your word. But what was I saying? Oh yes, about Oxford. Oxford is all right. I know you get the worst wine in the world there—I suppose it's specially imported for the benefit of the young men of the world who believe that anything is nectar if you pay more than ten bob a bottle for it—but you still find people drinking properly. Richly, I mean, and with conviction. I think I'd rather be a teetotaller——"
"Which God avert!" put in Cartmell.
"Amen to that. Yes, I'd rather be a True Blue than drink one glass of wine at dinner. One glass! It's an insult. Now at Oxford——"
"But, father," Robert interrupted, "the don of to-day is just the sort of person who does drink one glass of wine. With a kind of ghastly self-conscious moderation he sips some claret and then hurries off to organise a mission meeting. There aren't any good old fogeys left, only some fogeys without the merits of fogeyism. They've got consciences and think about social reform and the possibility of all classes pulling together before the last Red Day. You know the kind of thing. By Good Will out of Nervousness."
"Well then," answered Mr Berrisford, "I'm wrong. Oxford is going to the dogs. I suppose they had to let the dons marry, but they might have foreseen that the kind of women who would pounce on the dons wouldn't understand about the good life. I expect it's the women that are destroying Oxford. When Oxford spread northwards, it spread to the devil."
"But this is downright Toryism," protested Cartmell. "You call yourself a revolutionary!"
"So I am. But I'm sound about tradition and things that matter. I don't want soaking: I want proper drinking and proper talking. I thought it might have lingered in one or two common-rooms. Anyhow, the undergraduates——"
He paused a moment and then went on: