Mr. Porteous saw them off from Winstonbury station, exuding optimism, and taking great care not to suggest to Christopher that there was any likelihood of his being nervous. Sorrell had written to reserve rooms at the Bull,—and when they had dined, Kit took his first stroll along King's Parade, and past Caius to the great gate of Trinity.
They stood under the archway and looked across the Great Court, its greyness and its green lawns very tranquil under the evening sky. Wallflowers were in bloom about the fountain. The roof of the hall and of the Master's house were dark against a sheet of pale gold.
Christopher looked solemn. One of the moments to be remembered was his first glimpse of the Great Court of Trinity, though the significance of that stately quadrangle was to grow less and less in after years. A time would come when Christopher's memory of the college would grow strangely cold, as though only the shadow of himself had ever dwelt there. Later, he would wonder why the picture of the great college lacked glamour. Proud of it as he always was,—but not with the pride of a lover.
And on that first evening the spacious dignity of the place frightened him, nor did he ever succeed in arriving at a feeling of intimacy, though he spent a year in rooms in the Great Court. The college presented itself as a very large and stately old lady, a super-grandmother, to be respected as one respects a formidable social figure.
It is possible that Christopher was not a social creature, or not the true child of this prodigious old lady. In after years a Bloomsbury Square, or the Charing Cross Road left him with a sense of glamour that his college had lacked. For Kit's blood was not grey, nor was he quite like the mass of young men who wore the dark blue gown. He belonged to no ous aoe class, nor would he ever belong to any particular class, for he had absorbed from his father a little of the aloofness of the man who has had to fight for his own hand. To Kit his three years were to be mere ante-rooms to the larger outlook; he worked better than he played, though he was utterly without smugness.
Sorrell and Kit made their way through Nevil's Court and across the river to the "backs." The grass and the foliage were approaching the greyness of the winter, and
