"

"He looks a good man; but how ugly!"

"Do you think so? We shall have a hard day to-morrow. Good night,
dear."

"Good night, Katie. But I don't feel a bit sleepy." And so the
cousins kissed one another, and Miss Winter went to her own room.

CHAPTER XXVII

LECTURING A LIONESS

The evening of Show Sunday may serve as a fair sample of what
this eventful Commemoration was to our hero. The constant
intercourse with ladies--with such ladies as Miss Winter and
Mary--young, good-looking, well spoken, and creditable in all
ways, was very delightful, and the more fascinating, from the
sudden change which their presence wrought in the ordinary mode
of life of the place. They would have been charming in any room,
but were quite irrepressible in his den, which no female
presence, except that of his blowsy old bed-maker, had lightened
since he had been in possession. All the associations of the
fresh-man's room were raised at once. When he came in at night
now, he could look sentimentally at his arm chair (christened
"The Captain," after Captain Hardy), on which Katie had sat to
make breakfast; or at the brass peg on the door, on which Mary
had hung her bonnet and shawl, after displacing his gown. His
very teacups and saucers, which were already a miscellaneous set
of several different patterns, had made a move almost into his
affections; at least the two--one brown, one blue--which the
young ladies had used. A human interest belonged to them now, and
they were no longer mere crockery. He had thought of buying two
very pretty china ones, the most expensive he could find in
Oxford, and getting them to use these for the first time, but
rejected the idea. The fine new ones, he felt, would never be the
same to him. They had come in and used his own rubbish; that was
the great charm. If he had been going to give _them_ cups, no
material would have been beautiful enough; but for his own use
after them, the commoner the better. The material was nothing,
the association everything. It is marvellous the amount of
healthy sentiment of which a naturally soft-hearted undergraduate
is capable by the end of the summer term. But sentiment is not
all one-sided. The delights which spring from sudden intimacy
with the fairest and best part of the creation, are as far above
those of the ordinary, unmitigated undergraduate life, as the
British citizen of 1860 is above the rudimentary personage in
prehistoric times from whom he has bee