mplicated was the nature of Nick's business that he wished for greater
privacy, and he suggested a stroll in the direction of the gusher.

"You're an Oxford graduate, aren't you?" he began.

"Ya-as, I went up to Oxford from Eton," drawled Jerrold with an accent
which Nick disliked, but was ready to believe in as well-bred, because few
Englishmen to the "manner born" had happened to come his way. "All the
elder sons of my family, since the days of Charles the Second, don't you
know, have gone in for the Army; and that's what I should have liked, but
my eldest brother has the money as well as the title, d'you see, and I'm
only third son. I----"

"Yes," said Nick curtly. "But you mustn't worry to tell me all your
private affairs unless you really want to. Because what I'm most
interested in is the Oxford part. I never went to college, nor to any
school for the matter of that, except a night one, but I've tried to make
up a bit with reading all I could. I suppose I don't know much about
books, compared with you----"

"Oh, I was never much of a grind," the other cut in hastily. "I went in
for other things. I was cox----".

"It's etiquette I'm thinking of," Nick confessed humbly. "You'd be born
knowin' a lot about that, I dare say, in your family. And then, being at
Oxford, too! I always notice college men have a different way from those
who haven't been to any university. It's hard to explain the difference,
but it's there."

"Oh, rather," agreed the Englishman. "You know our King himself will send
all his sons to Oxford and Cambridge. Nothin' like it, my dear fellow,
what? Our family----"

"Could you give lessons, sort of object-lessons, in what to do and what
not do in society?" inquired Nick, eager yet shy, not ashamed of his
motive in asking, but fearful by instinct that he was not getting hold of
the right man.

"Nothing easier," returned Montagu Jerrold, the prominent gooseberries,
which were his eyes, looking somewhat less thoroughly boiled. "I was
thinkin' of leavin' this beastly hole, don't you know. Nothin' in it for a
gentleman, what? But if you've somethin' to offer worth takin', why I
might stick it out for a bit, I dessay."

Nick longed to box the' creature's ears; but they were well-shaped and
might be the ears of a man born with etiquette flowing with his blue
blood, through azure veins. The shape of his nose wasn't bad, but those
eyes and that chin! They were, as Nick grimly expressed it to himself