dignant
shade of celibacy seems to have called down on the dons a Nemesis which
precludes them from either marrying beauty or begetting it. (From the
Warden's son, that unhappy curate, Zuleika inherited no tittle of
her charm. Some of it, there is no doubt, she did inherit from the
circus-rider who was her mother.)

But the casual feminine visitors? Well, the sisters and cousins of an
undergraduate seldom seem more passable to his comrades than to himself.
Altogether, the instinct of sex is not pandered to in Oxford. It is not,
however, as it may once have been, dormant. The modern importation of
samples of femininity serves to keep it alert, though not to gratify it.
A like result is achieved by another modern development--photography.
The undergraduate may, and usually does, surround himself with
photographs of pretty ladies known to the public. A phantom harem! Yet
the houris have an effect on their sultan. Surrounded both by plain
women of flesh and blood and by beauteous women on pasteboard, the
undergraduate is the easiest victim of living loveliness--is as a fire
ever well and truly laid, amenable to a spark. And if the spark be such
a flaring torch as Zuleika?--marvel not, reader, at the conflagration.

Not only was the whole throng of youths drawing asunder before her:
much of it, as she passed, was forming up in her wake. Thus, with the
confluence of two masses--one coming away from the river, the other
returning to it--chaos seethed around her and the Duke before they were
half-way along the avenue. Behind them, and on either side of them, the
people were crushed inextricably together, swaying and surging this way
and that. "Help!" cried many a shrill feminine voice. "Don't push!" "Let
me out!" "You brute!" "Save me, save me!" Many ladies fainted, whilst
their escorts, supporting them and protecting them as best they could,
peered over the heads of their fellows for one glimpse of the divine
Miss Dobson. Yet for her and the Duke, in the midst of the terrific
compress, there was space enough. In front of them, as by a miracle
of deference, a way still cleared itself. They reached the end of the
avenue without a pause in their measured progress. Nor even when they
turned to the left, along the rather narrow path beside the barges, was
there any obstacle to their advance. Passing evenly forward, they alone
were cool, unhustled, undishevelled.

The Duke was so rapt in his private thoughts that he was hardly
co