“It is becoming natural. You haven't seen much of me during the last year, or you would have remarked it. And then, as I tell you, Oxford, when one has nothing to do in it but to moon about, thinking over one's past follies and sins, isn't cheerful. It never was a very cheerful place to me at the best of times.”
“Not even at pulling times?”
“Well, the river is the part I like best to think of. But even the river makes me rather melancholy now. One feels one has done with it.”
“Why, Tom, I believe your melancholy comes from their not having asked you to pull in the boat.”
“Perhaps it does. Don't you call it degrading to be pulling in the torpid in one's old age?”
“Mortified vanity, man! They have a capital boat. I wonder how we should have liked to have been turned out for some bachelor just because he had pulled a good oar in his day?”
“Not at all. I don't blame the young ones, and I hope to do my duty in the torpid. By the way, they are an uncommonly nice set of youngsters. Much better behaved in every way than we were, unless it is that they put on their best manners before me.”
“No, I don't think they do. The fact is they are really fine young fellows.”
“So I think. And I'll tell you what, Jack; since we are sitting and talking our minds to one another at last, like old times, somebody has made the most wonderful change in this college. I rather think it is seeing what St. Ambrose's is now, and thinking what it was in my time, and what an uncommon member of society I should have turned out if I had had the luck to have been here now instead of then, that makes me down in the mouth—more even than having to pull in the torpid instead of the racing boat.”
“You do think it is improved, then?”