es, I can't
settle to anything."

"Well, they'll be here directly. I wonder what on earth she'll do with
all her money. Father says she may spend it, if she wants to. He's
trustee, but Uncle Risborough's letter to him said she was to have the
income if she wished--_now_. Only she's not to touch the capital till
she's twenty-five."

"It's a good lot, isn't it?" said Nora, walking about. "I wonder how
many people in Oxford have two thousand a year? A girl too. It's really
rather exciting."

"It won't be very nice for us--she'll be so different." Alice's tone was
a little sulky and depressed. The advent of this girl cousin, with her
title, her good looks, her money, and her unfair advantages in the way
of talking French and Italian, was only moderately pleasant to the
eldest Miss Hooper.

"What--you think she'll snuff us out?" laughed Nora. "Not she! Oxford's
not like London. People are not such snobs."

"What a silly thing to say, Nora! As if it wasn't an enormous pull
everywhere to have a handle to your name, and lots of money!"

"Well, I really think it'll matter less here than anywhere. Oxford, my
dear--or some of it--pursues 'the good and the beautiful'"--said Nora,
taking a flying leap on to the window-sill again, and beginning to poke
up some tadpoles in a jar, which stood on the window-ledge.

Alice did not think it worth while to continue the conversation. She had
little or nothing of Nora's belief in the other-worldliness of Oxford.
At this period, some thirty odd years ago, the invasion of Oxford on the
north by whole new tribes of citizens had already begun. The old days of
University exclusiveness in a ring fence were long done with; the days
of much learning and simple ways, when there were only two carriages in
Oxford that were not doctors' carriages, when the wives of professors
and tutors went out to dinner in "chairs" drawn by men, and no person
within the magic circle of the University knew anybody--to speak of--in
the town outside. The University indeed, at this later moment, still
more than held its own, socially, amid the waves of new population that
threatened to submerge it; and the occasional spectacle of retired
generals and colonels, the growing number of broughams and victorias in
the streets, or the rumours of persons with "smart" or "county"
connections to be found among the rows of new villas spreading up the
Banbury Road were still not sufficiently marked to disturb the essential
ch