is bedroom at the Trencher: so
anxious was he to begin his college life, and to get into his own
apartments. What did he think about, as he lay tossing and awake? Was it
about his mother at home; the pious soul whose life was bound up in
his? Yes, let us hope he thought of her a little. Was it about Miss
Fotheringay, and his eternal passion, which had kept him awake so many
nights, and created such wretchedness and such longing? He had a trick
of blushing, and if you had been in the room, and the candle had not
been out, you might have seen the youth's countenance redden more than
once, as he broke out into passionate incoherent exclamations regarding
that luckless event of his life. His uncle's lessons had not been thrown
away upon him; the mist of passion had passed from his eyes now, and he
saw her as she was. To think that he, Pendennis, had been enslaved by
such a woman, and then jilted by her! that he should have stooped so
low, to be trampled on the mire! that there was a time in his life, and
that but a few months back, when he was willing to take Costigan for his
father-in-law!

"Poor old Smirke!" Pen presently laughed out--"well, I'll write and try
and console the poor old boy. He won't die of his passion, ha, ha!" The
Major, had he been awake, might have heard a score of such ejaculations
uttered by Pen as he lay awake and restless through the first night of
his residence at Oxbridge.

It would, perhaps, have been better for a youth, the battle of whose
life was going to begin on the morrow, to have passed the eve in a
fferent sort of vigil: but the world had got hold of Pen in the shape of
his selfish old Mentor: and those who have any interest in his character
must have perceived ere now, that this lad was very weak as well as
very impetuous, very vain as well as very frank, and if of a generous
disposition, not a little selfish in the midst of his profuseness, and
also rather fickle, as all eager pursuers of self-gratification are.

The six months' passion had aged him very considerably. There was an
immense gulf between Pen the victim of love, and Pen the innocent boy
of eighteen, sighing after it: and so Arthur Pendennis had all the
experience and superiority, besides that command which afterwards
conceit and imperiousness of disposition gave him over the young men
with whom he now began to live.

He and his uncle passed the morning with great satisfaction in making
purchases for the better comfort o