Nora shook her head, with an air of middle-aged wisdom.
“Connie will marry whomever she has a mind to!” she said firmly. “And it’s no good, father, you imagining anything else.”
Ewen Hooper laughed, released her, and sent her to bed.
The days that followed represented the latter part of the interval between the Eights and Commemoration, before Oxford plunged once more into high festival.
It was to be a brilliant Commem.; for an ex-Viceroy of India, a retired Ambassador, England’s best General, and five or six foreign men of science and letters, of rather exceptional eminence, were coming to get their honorary degrees. When Mrs. Hooper, _Times_ in hand, read out at the breakfast-table the names of Oxford’s expected guests, Constance Bledlow looked up in surprised amusement. It seemed the Ambassador and she were old friends; that she had sat on his knee as a baby through various Carnival processions in the Corso, showing him how to throw _confetti_; and that he and Lady F. had given a dance at the Embassy for her coming-out, when Connie, at seventeen, and His Excellency—still the handsomest man in the room, despite years and gout—had danced the first waltz together, and a subsequent minuet; which—though Connie did not say so—had been the talk of Rome.
As to the ex-Viceroy, he was her father’s first cousin, and had passed through Rome on his way east, staying three or four days at the Palazzo Barberini. Constance, however, could not be induced to trouble her head about him. “He bored Mamma and me dreadfully,” she said—“he had seven pokers up his back, and was never human for a minute. I don’t want to see him at all.” Oxford, however, seemed to be of the opinion that ex-viceroys do want to see their cousins; for the Hooper party found themselves asked as a matter of course to the All Souls’ luncheon, the Vice-Chancellor’s garden-party, and to a private dinner-party in Christ Church on the day of the Encænia, at which all the new-made doctors were to be present. As for the ball-tickets for Commem. week, they poured in; and meanwhile there were endless dinner-parties, and every afternoon had its river picnic, now on the upper, now on the lower river.
It was clear, indeed, both to her relations and to Oxford in general, that Constance Bledlow was to be the heroine of the moment. She would be the “star” of Commem., as so many other pretty or charming girls had been before her. But in her case, it was no mere undergraduate success. Old and young alike agreed to praise her. Her rank inevitably gave her precedence at almost every dinner-party, Oxford society not being rich in the peerage. The host, who was often the head of a college and grey-haired, took her in; and some other University big-wig, equally mature, flanked her on the right. When she was undressing in her little room after these entertainments, she would give Annette a yawning or plaintive account of them. “You know, Annette, I never talk to anybody under fifty now!” But at the time she never failed to play her part. She was born with the wish to please, which, as every one knows, makes three parts of the art of pleasing.