“Would you mind doing me a great favor?” said Tom, after a minute.
“Anything I can do.—What is it?”
“Why, just to step round on our way back,—I will stay as far off as you like,—and see how things are going on;—how she is.”
“Very well. Don't you like this view of Oxford? I always think it is the best of them all.”
“No. You don't see anything of half the colleges,” said Tom, who was very loath to leave the other subject for the picturesque.
“But you get all the spires and towers so well, and the river in the foreground. Look at that shadow of a cloud skimming over Christchurch Meadow. It's a splendid old place after all.”
“It may be from a distance, to an outsider,” said Tom; “but I don't know—it's an awfully chilly, deadening kind of place to live in. There's something in the life of the place that sits on me like a weight, and makes me feel dreary.”
“How long have you felt that? You're coming out in a new line.”
“I wish I were. I want a new line. I don't care a straw for cricket; I hardly like pulling; and as for those wine parties day after day, and suppers night after night, they turn me sick to think of.”
“You have the remedy in your own hands, at any rate,” said Hardy, smiling.