n different "sides," they had not chanced to meet,
either in lecture-room or elsewhere. Julian, not knowing whether his
position as sizar would make any difference in Bruce's estimation of
him, had naturally left him to take the initiative in calling; while
Bruce, on the other hand, always a little jealous of his brilliant
contemporary, and not too anxious to be familiar with a sizar, pretended
to himself that it was as much Julian's place as his to be first in
calling. Hence it was that, for the first fortnight, the two did not
happen to come across each other.

Meanwhile Bruce also had made many fresh acquaintances. His reputation
for immense wealth and considerable talent--his dashing easy manner--his
handsome person and elaborate style of dress, attracted notice, and very
soon threw him into the circle of all the young fashionables of Saint
Werner's. His style of life cannot be better described than by saying
that he affected the fine gentleman. Hardly a day had passed during
which he had not been at some large breakfast or wine-party, or formed
one of a select little body of supping aristocrats. He did very little
work, and pretended to do none, (for Bruce was a first-rate specimen of
the never-open-a-book genus), although at unexpected hours he took care
to get up the lecture-room subjects sufficiently well to make a display
when he was put on. Even in this he was unsuccessful, for scholarship
cannot be acquired _per saltum_, and Mr Serjeant, the lecturer on his
side, looked on him with profound contempt as a puppy who was all the
more offensive from pretending to some knowledge. He told him that he
might distinguish himself by hard steady work, but would never do so
without infinitely more pains than he took the trouble to apply. His
quiet and caustic strictures, and the easy sarcasm with which he would
allow Bruce to flourish his way through a passage, and then go through
it himself, pointing out how utterly Bruce had "hopped with airy and
fastidious levity" above all the nicer shades of meaning, and slurred
over his ignorance of a difficulty by some piece of sonorous nonsense,
made him peculiarly the object of the young man's disgust. But though
Mr Serjeant wounded his vanity, the irony of "a musty old don," as
Bruce contemptuously called him, was amply atoned for by the compliments
of the fast young admirers whom Bruce soon gathered round him, and some
of whom were always to be found after hall-time s