The Babe was a cynical old gentleman of twenty years of age, who played the banjo charmingly. In his less genial moments he spoke querulously of the monotony of the services of the Church of England, and of the hopeless respectability of M. Zola. His particular forte was dinner parties for six, skirt dancing and acting, and the performances of the duties of half-back at Rugby football. His dinner parties were selected with the utmost carelessness, his usual plan being to ask the first five people he met, provided he did not know them too intimately. With a wig of fair hair, hardly any rouge, and an ingÉnue dress, he was the image of Vesta Collins, and that graceful young lady might have practised before him, as before a mirror. But far the most remarkable point about the Babe, considering his outward appearance and other tastes, was his brilliance as a Rugby football player. He was extraordinarily quick with the ball, his passing was like a beautiful dream, and he dodged, as was universally known, like the devil. It was a sight for sore eyes to see the seraphic, smooth-faced Babe waltzing gaily about among rough-bearded barbarians, pretending to pass and doing nothing of the kind, dropping neatly out of what looked like the middle of the scrimmage, or flickering about in a crowd which seemed to be unable to touch him with a finger.

Last night the Babe had been completely in his element. His dinner party consisted of a rowing-blue, a man who had been sent down from Oxford, a Dean who was to preach the University sermon next day, and was the Babe’s uncle, Jack Marsden, a gentleman from Corpus, who had a very rosy chance, so said his friends, of representing Cambridge against Oxford at chess, and himself. Later on, Reggie and Ealing had come in, who with the help of the rowing man broke both his sofas; the gentleman from Oxford had insisted, to the obvious discomfort of the Dean, on talking to him about predestination, a subject of which the Dean seemed to know nothing whatever; the chess-man had played bÉzique with Jack, and the Babe had presided over them all with infantine cynicism. A little later on, when the Dean had gone away, he had danced a skirt-dance in a sheet and a night-gown, and they ended up the evening by what the Babe called “a set piece” from his window, consisting of a catherine wheel, and four Roman candles, not counting the rocket which exploded backwards through the Babe’s chandelier, narrowly missing the head of the man from Corpus, whose chance of getting his chess-blue would, if it had hit, have been totally extinguished. In order to lend verisimilitude to the proceedings Reggie had gone into the street and called “Oh-h-h-h,” at intervals, and as he had left his cap and gown in the Babe’s room, he was very promptly and properly proctorised.

The Babe breakfasted next morning at the civilised hour of ten, and observed with a faint smile that the rocket stick was deeply imbedded in the ceiling, and he ate his eggs and bacon with a serene sense of the successful incongruity of his little party the night before. The gentleman from Oxford who was staying with him had not yet appeared, but the Babe waited for no man, when he was hungry.

The furniture of his rooms was as various and as diverse as his accomplishments. Several of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations from the Yellow Book, clustering round a large photograph of Botticelli’s Primavera, which the Babe had never seen, hung above one of the broken sofas, and in his bookcase several numbers of the Yellow Book, which the Babe declared bitterly had turned grey in a single night, since the former artist had ceased to draw for it, were ranged side by side with Butler’s Analogies, Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and Miss Marie Corelli’s Barabbas. It is, however, only fair to the Babe to say that Bishop Butler’s volume had been part of the “set piece” for his Littlego, and that he referred to Miss Corelli as the arch humourist of English literature. A pair of dumb-bells, each weighing fifty-six pounds, stood by the fireplace, but these the Babe had never been known to use in order to further his muscular development; he only rolled them over the floor with the patient look of one who had the destinies of the world on his shoulders, whenever the lodger below played the piano. It may be remarked that the two were not on speaking terms.

“And herein,” said the Babe, when he explained the use of the dumb-bells the evening before, “herein lies half the bitterness of human life.”

He was pressed to explain further, but only replied sadly,

“So near and yet so far,” and showed how it was possible to imitate the experience of a sea-sick passenger on the channel, by means of “that simple, and I may add, delicious fruit, the common orange.”

It was a most realistic and spirited performance, and all that the Dean could do was to ejaculate feebly, “Do stop, Babe,” between his spasms of laughter.

The Babe had finished his breakfast, which he ate with a good appetite, heartily, before the gentleman from Oxford appeared, and proceeded to skim the Sunday Times. When he did appear he looked a little disconsolately at the breakfast table, and lifting up a dish-cover found some cold bacon, at which he blanched visibly, and demanded soda water.

“What did you eat for breakfast, Babe?” he asked.

The Babe looked up apologetically.

“I’m afraid I ate all the eggs, and the bacon must be cold by now,” he said. “But I’ll send for some more.”

“No thanks. Where’s the tea?”

The Babe rang the bell.

“It’ll be here in a moment. I drank cocoa.”

Leamington finished his soda water, and sat down.

“There is no end to your greatness. Cocoa! Great Scot! My tongue is the colour of mortar.”

“I’m so sorry. I feel quite well, thanks. Will you have some Eno’s fruit salts? I know my landlady’s got some, because she offered me them the other day when I had a cold. Here’s your tea. Do you ever read the Pink ’un? It’s funny without being prudish.”

Leamington poured out some tea.

“Don’t read, Babe; it’s unsociable. Talk to me while I eat.”

The Babe put down the current copy of the Sunday Times, and laid himself out to be pleasant.

“There are some people coming to lunch at two,” he said. “I rather think I asked Reggie. Poor Reggie, he got dropped on in a minute by the Proggins. Oh, yes, and so is Stewart. Do you know Stewart? He’s a don at Trinity, and is supposed to be wicked. I wish someone would suppose me to be wicked. But I’m beginning to be afraid they never will.”

“You must lose your look of injured innocence or rather cultivate the injury at the expense of the innocence. Grow a moustache; no one looks battered and world-weary without a moustache.”

“I can’t. I bought some Allen’s Hair Restorer the other day, but it only smarted. I wonder if they made a mistake and gave me Allen’s Antifat?”

“You don’t look as if they had,” said Leamington, “at least it doesn’t look as if it had had much effect. Wouldn’t it take?”

“Not a bit,” said the Babe. “I applied it night and morning to my upper lip, and it only smelt and smarted. I suppose you can’t restore a thing that has never existed. I think I shall be a clergyman, because all clergymen cut their moustaches off, and to do that you must have one.”

“I see. But isn’t that rather elaborate?”

“No means are elaborate if you desire the end enough,” said the Babe sententiously. “I shall marry too, because married people are bald, and I’m sure I don’t wonder.”

“So are babies.”

“Not in the same way, and don’t be personal. I can’t think of any other means of losing the appearance of innocence. Suggest some: you’ve been rusticated.”

“Why don’t you—”

“I’ve tried that, and it’s no use.”

“But you don’t know what I was going to say,” objected Leamington.

“I know I don’t. But I’ve tried it,” said the wicked Babe. “I’ve even read the Yellow Book through from cover to cover, and as you see, framed the pictures by Aubrey Beardsley. The Yellow Book is said to add twenty years per volume to any one’s life. Not at all. It has left me precisely where it found me, whereas, according to that, as I’ve read five volumes, I ought to be, let’s see—five times twenty, plus twenty—a hundred and twenty. I don’t look it, you know. It’s no use your telling me I do, because I don’t. I have no illusions whatever about the matter.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you anything of the kind,” said Leamington. “But you should take yourself more seriously. I believe that is very aging.”

The Babe opened his eyes in the wildest astonishment.

“Why I take myself like Gospels and Epistles,” he said. “The fault is that no one else takes me seriously. You would hardly believe,” he continued with some warmth, “that the other night I was proctorised, and that when the Proctor saw who I was—he’s a Trinity man—he said, ‘Oh, it’s only you. Go home at once, Babe.’ It is perfectly disheartening. I offered to let him search me to see whether I had such a thing as a cap or a gown concealed anywhere about me. And the bull-dogs grinned. How can I be a devil of a fellow, if I’m treated like that?”

“I should have thought a Rugby blue could have insisted on being treated properly.”

“No, that’s all part of the joke,” shrieked the infuriated Babe. “It’s supposed to add a relish to the silly pointless joke of treating me like a child and calling me ‘Babe.’ I’ve never been called anything but Babe since I can remember. And when I try to be proctorised the very bull-dogs come about me, making mouths at me.”

“Rough luck. Try it on again.”

“It’s a pure waste of time,” said the Babe disconsolately. “I might go out for a drive with all the bed-makers of this college in a tandem, and no one would take the slightest notice of me. Besides I can never make a tandem go straight. The leader always turns round and winks at me. It knows perfectly well that I’m only the Babe, bless its heart. I edited a perfectly scandalous magazine here last term you know, every day during the May week. It simply teemed with scurrilous suggestiveness. It insulted directly every one with whom I was acquainted, and many people with whom I was not. It compared the Vice-Chancellor to an old toothbrush, and drew a trenchant parallel between the Proctors and the town drainage. It suggested that the antechapel of King’s should be turned into a shooting-gallery, and the side chapels into billiard-rooms. It proposed that I should be appointed Master of Magdalen, I forget why at this moment. It contained the results of a plÉbiscite as to who should be Vice-Chancellor for the next year, and the under-porter of King’s got in easily, with Jack Marsden as a bad second. It proposed the substitution of dominoes and hopscotch—I haven’t the least idea what hopscotch is, but it sounds to me simply obscene—for the inter-university contests at cricket and rowing. And that magazine,” said the Babe dramatically, rising from his chair, and addressing Primavera, “that magazine was welcomed, welcomed, Madam, by all classes. The innocent lambs, whose reputation I ought to have ruined came bleating after me and said how they had enjoyed it. It sold by hundreds, when it ought to have been suppressed: people thought it funny, whereas it was only hopelessly foolish and vulgar, though I say it who shouldn’t; while those few people who had the sense to see how despicable the whole production really was, told each other that ‘it was only Me.’ Me! I’m almost sick of the word. I was put ‘in Authority’ in the Granta, when I ought to have been sent down—The Vice-Chancellor asked me to dinner on the very day when I published a most infernal and libellous lampoon about him, and I have already told you how the Proctors treat me. It is enough,” said the Babe in conclusion, “to make one take the veil, I mean the tonsure, and dry up the milk of human kindness within one.”

“Hear, hear,” shouted Leamington. “Good old Babe.”

The Babe glared at him a moment, with wide, indignant eyes and then went on rather shrilly:

“Look at Reggie. I’m older than he is, at least I think so, and any one with a grain of sense would say that I therefore ought to know better, and what is excusable in him, is not excusable in me, but he goes and says ‘Oh’ in the street and he is treated as a dangerous character, sent home, and will be fined. I might say ‘Oh’ till Oscar Browning got into Parliament, and do you suppose they would ever consider me a dangerous character? Not they. (Here the Babe laughed in a hollow and scornful manner.) They would treat me with that infernal familiarity which I so deprecate, and say, ‘Go home, Babe.’ Babe indeed!”

The Babe’s voice broke, and he flung himself into his chair after the manner of Sarah Bernhardt, and hissed out “MisÉrables! Comme je les dÉteste!”

Leamington applauded this histrionic effort, and feeling a little better after breakfast, lit a cigarette. The maidservant came to clear breakfast away, and as she left the room the Babe resumed in the gentle, melancholy tones, which were natural to him:

“If I thought it would do any good, I would go and snatch a kiss from that horrid, rat-faced girl as she is carrying the tray down stairs. But it wouldn’t, you know; it wouldn’t do any good at all. She wouldn’t complain to the landlady, or if she did it would only end in my giving her half-a-crown. Besides, I don’t in the least want to kiss her—I wouldn’t do it if she gave me half-a-crown. I wonder what George Moore would do if he were me. We’ll ask Stewart when he comes to lunch. He is intimate with all notable people. George Moore is notable isn’t he? I fancy W. H. Smith & Son boycotted him. Stewart said the other day that the Emperor of Germany was one of the nicest emperors he had ever seen.”

“That’s nothing,” said Leamington. “There’s a don at Oxford who has written a book called Princes I have Persecuted without Encouragement.”

The Babe laughed.

“A companion volume to Stewart’s Monarchs I have Met. Not that he has written such a book. Stewart is perfectly charming, but he thinks a lot of a Prince. If he hasn’t written Monarchs I have Met, he ought to have.”

“We all ought to have done a lot of things we haven’t done,” said Leamington.

“We had a butler once,” said the Babe, “who never would say the General Confession, because he said he hadn’t left undone the things he ought to have done, and it went against his conscience to say he had. He got the sack soon after for leaving the door of the cellar undone, and for getting drunk.”

“So he was undone himself.”

“When I grow up,” said the Babe with less bitterness, but returning like a burned moth to the sore subject—no charge for mixed metaphors—“I shall live exclusively in the society of archdeacons. Perhaps they might think me wicked. Yet I don’t know—my uncle whom you met last night thinks I’m such a good boy, and he’s a dean.”

“I doubt if they would. The other day some one sent a telegram to the Archdeacon of Basingstoke, a man of whom he knew nothing except that he was a teetotaller and an anti-vivisectionist, saying, ‘Fly at once, all is discovered.’ The Archdeacon flew, and has never been heard of since. No one has the slightest idea where he has gone or what he had done. You know you wouldn’t fly, Babe, if you were sent telegrams like that by the hundred.”

“How little you know me,” said the Babe dramatically. “I should fly like fun. Don’t you see if one flew, one’s character for wickedness would be established beyond all doubt. I might send a telegram to myself, telling me to fly. Then I should fly, but leave the telegram lying about in a conspicuous position. After a year’s absence I should return, but my character would be gone beyond all hopes of recovery, and the world would do me justice at last.”

“Poor misunderstood Babe! Why don’t you go to Oxford, saying you’ve been sent down from Cambridge? What time do we lunch?”

“Oh, about two, and it’s half-past twelve already. Let’s go round to the Pitt. This evening we will go to Trinity Chapel. A little walk is very wholesome after breakfast. Besides I shall go in a bowler, and perhaps we shall meet at Proggins. I shall insult him if we do.”