o enjoy it so much.

"Delicious life," said his mother, as he punted her away from the
tinkling crowd on the bank. "I'm not surprised you like Oxford, dear
Michael."

"I like it--I liked it, I mean, very much more when it was altogether
different from this sort of thing. The great point of Oxford--in fact,
the whole point of Oxford--is that there are no girls."

"How charmingly savage you are, dear boy," said his mother. "And how
absurd to pretend you don't care for girls."

"But I don't," he asserted. "In Oxford I actually dislike them very
much. They're out of place except in Banbury Road. Dons should never
have been allowed to marry. Really, mother, women in Oxford are wrong."

"Of course, I can't argue with you. But there seem to me to be a great
many of them."

"Great scott, you don't think it's like this in term-time, do you?"

"Isn't it?" said Mrs. Fane, apparently very much surprised. "I thought
undergraduates were so famously susceptible. I'm sure they are, too."

"Do you mean to say you really thought this Commem herd was always
roaming about Oxford?"

"Michael, your Oxford expressions are utterly unintelligible to me."

"Don't you realize you are up here for Commem--for Commemoration?" he
asked.

"How wonderful!" she said. "Don't tell me any more. It's so romantic, to
be told one is 'up' for something."

Michael began to laugh, and the irritation of seeing the peaceful banks
of the upper river dappled with feminine forms, so that everywhere the
cattle had moved away to browse in the remote corners of the meadows,
vanished.

The ball at Christ Church seemed likely to be the most successful and to
be the one that would remain longest in the memories of those who had
taken part in this Commemoration. Nowhere could an arbiter of pleasure
have found so perfect a site for his most elaborate entertainment.
There was something very strangely romantic in this gay assembly
dancing in the great hall of the House, so that along the cloisters
sounded the unfamiliar noise of fiddles; but what gave principally the
quality of romance and strangeness was that beyond the music, beyond the
fantastically brilliant hall, stretched all around the dark quadrangles
deserted now save where about their glooms dresses indeterminate as
moths were here and there visible. The decrescent moon would scarcely
survive the dawn, and meanwhile there would be darkness everywhere away
from the golden heart of the dance in that gre