The hot sun, that year’s first, had drawn birds, insects, and plants into the open to receive its benediction: only human beings, sitting in offices, standing at benches and lathes, and going down coal mines with lamps in their helmets, withdrew themselves from it. In the College, however, all pretence of work had ceased at lunch-time. The undergraduates, who had been chosen from among many applicants on the strength of their intelligence, breeding, and ability to uphold the academic tradi­tion of six centuries, were sitting on the grass in the garden with their shirts off, making clumsy and inexperienced overtures to the giggling maidens who accompanied them. Some had also removed their shoes and socks. The sunlight glinted on their spectacles, and the sound of their voices, delivering volleys of vulgar badinage in a variety of uncouth provincial accents, offered serious compe­tition to the riot of bird-song that went on above their heads. The formal beauty of the groves and flower-beds, set off by the breath­taking perfection of the grey stonework of the College itself, strove to the limit of its power to soften and contain their boorish­ness, but was defeated by their appalling mental and physical ugliness as they sprawled on the ground or loafed coarsely to and fro, smoking cigarettes and scattering stubs, empty packets, and match-sticks on the velvety turf. Now and again some don, blinded by habit both to the beauty and the sordidness of the scene about him, scurried through the garden with the brisk, proprietary stride of a shop-walker in a big store: none of the wealth on show is his, but somehow it lends him some of its prestige.