It was very worldly and very brilliant in the garden. Beside a crowd of ladies and young men, three Professors and two Heads of Houses had already arrived, and others were expected.
Mr. White, Mr. Long, and Mr. Maple Fetters, the young unmarried Fellows who were giving the party, kept glancing toward the gateway, over the shoulders of their arriving guests--all smiles, however, as they greeted their friends with apposite remarks. On tables under the trees white cloths were spread, looking almost blue in the vivid green, and on them were plates of red strawberries, ancient silver bowls of sugar, and dewy jugs of lemonade. Sounds of discreet gaiety, voices and laughter, and the tinkling of glasses, quickened the sleepy silence of the garden; while from beneath a high and fleecy cloud the rays of the westering sun brightened the tree-tops and walls, lingered on the ladies' dresses, and streaked with blue shadows the old green lawn. It put Craik in mind of old coloured French pictures he had seen, or the courtly fêtes he had read of; he thought, too, of the garden party in "_Love's Cottage_," a pretty novel he had looked at lately, the party where Miss Molyneux first meets Pastorel the poet.
He kept smiling as he moved about, but he really felt rather shy and alien; if he only knew more people, and could be seen laughing and talking and moving his hands, like the other young men!
He came across one of his pupils at last, and began to speak to him of the recent boat-races in an animated way. But the undergraduate moved off suddenly, with a hasty excuse, to join some ladies who had just arrived, and Craik heard himself observing to a bush that "Brazenose had rowed very well." The observation, he felt, was not brilliant, even for conversation with a freshman; but as a fragment of soliloquy! He looked round; no one could have overheard him? Soon he met his friend, Mrs. Cotton, the wife of Professor Cotton, and he begged to be allowed to get her an ice, or some other refreshment. The pink ice and biscuit were inadequate, it struck him, as he carried them with care toward the large presence of Mrs. Cotton; but was not this inadequacy, after all, of a piece with the delicious and conventional unreality of an affair like this? He noticed a brilliant purple feather conspicuously waving from the top of Mrs. Cotton's bonnet, and was glad that everything was so bright. How pleasant it was on a summer day, how pleasant and harmless to play brilliantly at life! And, he thought with a smile, did not old Aristotle himself place Magnificence high among the virtues?