“How typical!” as they admired the _négligé_ of his flannel “bags” of 1907.
“Wonder why this young man wasn’t doing his bit,” they would say querulously when they turned over and found him forming, together with the aged President and a neutral student from Liberia, the group of 1917.
David had warned Gaveston that twenty minutes to eleven was generally considered the “right” hour of the evening to knock for the first time at the door of the sempiternal Dean. But for his first visit, modestly postponed until his second night, Gav was careful of effect.
He waited until all the divergent clocks of Oxford had heralded the full three-quarters before he crossed towards the kindly red glow of the curtained embrasure behind which the recognized Mongoons were already gathered. Stopping for a moment by the Hall steps, he rehearsed the intimate smile and the easy hand-wave that would of a surety ingratiate him with Mongo and the Mongoons on this entry into a circle where youth and charm and wit were indeed familiar, but Gaveston ffoulis something new.
It would do. Spirally he climbed the turret staircase.
“Come in!” came the welcoming cry of half a dozen eager guests who responded to his discreet but confident knock.
The famous don, as usual, was curled like a beautiful cat[4] on the hob. With soft plump hands he clasped his dilapidated slippers, his golden head was bowed over his chest, his frayed shirt-sleeves delightfully visible, his chubby knees showed through the worn flannel trousers which had looked so smart in the mid-Edwardian groups.
[4] Other novelists have respectively described this invaluable character as crouching like an _opossum_, a _satyr_, a _panther_, or perched like a _canary_, a _vulture_, an _angel_. A few, less successful, have denied or pretended to ignore his existence. Mr. Budd has found a singularly happy mean. (LIT. EXEC.)
“Dear Mongo!” called Gaveston, picking his way over the outstretched legs of four fifth-year Mongoons on the shabby sofa.
“Gaveston,” he answered, with a quick amber light in his eyes. “Welcome, thrice welcome. You all know each other, of course.” And he waved a vague hand round the circle of the Mongoons.
There was a silence as Gav sat down beside the others on the sofa. But he felt no shyness--he even poured out for himself a glass of his host’s famous barley-water, a drink which the Mongoons for years had loyally affected to enjoy. And the brilliant conversation resumed its nightly flow as he held up his glass to the light, sipped it, and lay back to survey this room which he was at last seeing in all its reality.