s nose! It poured twice with blood in the Long."

"Yes?"

"It's a thing that ought to be known. I assure you, that little room!...
And in any case, Mr. Elliot's a gentleman that can ill afford to lose
it. Luckily his friends were up; and I always say they're more like
brothers than anything else."

"Nice for him. He has no real brothers."

"Oh, Mr. Hornblower, he is a merry gentleman, and Mr. Tilliard too!
And Mr. Elliot himself likes his romp at times. Why, it's the merriest
staircase in the buildings! Last night the bedmaker from W said to
me,'What are you doing to my gentlemen? Here's Mr. Ansell come back 'ot
with his collar flopping.' I said, 'And a good thing.' Some bedders keep
their gentlemen just so; but surely, miss, the world being what it is,
the longer one is able to laugh in it the better."

Bedmakers have to be comic and dishonest. It is expected of them. In a
picture of university life it is their only function. So when we meet
one who has the face of a lady, and feelings of which a lady might be
proud, we pass her by.

"Yes?" said Miss Pembroke, and then their talk was stopped by the
arrival of her brother.

"It is too bad!" he exclaimed. "It is really too bad."

"Now, Bertie boy, Bertie boy! I'll have no peevishness."

"I am not peevish, Agnes, but I have a full right to be. Pray, why did
he not meet us? Why did he not provide rooms? And pray, why did you
leave me to do all the settling? All the lodgings I knew are full, and
our bedrooms look into a mews. I cannot help it. And then--look here!
It really is too bad." He held up his foot like a wounded dog. It was
dripping with water.

"Oho! This explains the peevishness. Off with it at once. It'll be
another of your colds."

"I really think I had better." He sat down by the fire and daintily
unlaced his boot. "I notice a great change in university tone. I can
never remember swaggering three abreast along the pavement and charging
inoffensive visitors into a gutter when I was an undergraduate. One of
the men, too, wore an Eton tie. But the others, I should say, came from
very queer schools, if they came from any schools at all."

Mr. Pembroke was nearly twenty years older than his sister, and had
never been as handsome. But he was not at all the person to knock into
a gutter, for though not in orders, he had the air of being on the verge
of them, and his features, as well as his clothes, had the clerical
cut. In his presence conversation be