The Babe spent June and the first half of July in London. He painted his bicycle white with Mr. Aspinall’s best enamel, and presented a very elegant appearance on it every morning in Battersea Park. The elections were on, and his father, who represented the Conservative interests of a manufacturing town in the North of England, was absent from London, in the hopes of representing them again. But party questions did not interest his son, and the Babe, reflecting that whether the Liberals or Conservatives governed the country, Battersea Park would still be open to him and his bicycle, pursued his calm course on a moderately evenly-balanced wheel.

So the Babe had a commodious house in Prince’s Gate at his disposal. For he was the only child, and his mother, who was a keener politician even than his father, accompanied the latter on his political errands. It occurred to him that he might turn an honest penny by letting the whole of the first floor for a week or two after the manner of Mr. Somerset, when he found himself in possession of the Superfluous Mansion, but after some consideration, he dismissed this as an unworthy and inconvenient economy, and telegraphed to Reggie to leave Cambridge and the May week to take care of themselves and join him. Reggie had kept his term, so he obeyed, taking with him several classical books, for the Babe, so he said in his telegram, meant to “sap.”

The Babe’s “sapping” was conducted on highly original principles. He got up at eight, “in order,” he said, “to get a long morning,” had a cup of tea, and then took his bicycle with him in his mother’s victoria to Battersea Park, where he rode till ten, and then had breakfast. He got back to Prince’s Gate about eleven in the victoria which waited for him at the Park, had a bath and dressed, and usually went off to Lord’s where he watched cricket till lunch time from the top of the pavilion, and if the match was interesting stopped on till about five. He then went to the Bath Club where he bathed and had tea, returning home in time to dress for dinner, which he usually took at a friend’s house. The evening was spent at a theatre or a music hall, and he finished up if possible at a dance. If he had no dance to go to, he read the evening paper at a club, and went to bed.

“In fact,” as he explained to Reggie, who arrived one evening about seven, “we shall lead a simple and strenuous life even in the midst of this modern Babylon. The bicycle and the Bath Club will minister to the needs of the body, and our minds will minister to each other. We take our dinner to-night at home, and after dinner it would be rash not to see Miss Cecilia Loftus. She can dance like fun. I hope you have brought some books, for otherwise you will have nothing to do when I am working. It’s time to dress. I see my father made four speeches yesterday. His energy is perfectly amazing. We will send for the evening paper, for there are things of overwhelming interest in it, I am told, apart from politics.”

The programme at the “Pavilion” waned in interest after the performance of Miss Cecilia Loftus, and about eleven the Babe proposed an adjournment. It was a warm clear night, and they started back, walking along Piccadilly instead of taking a hansom. The streets were full, and characteristically “London,” in other words they were crowded with all sorts and conditions of men and women, who eyed one another with suspicious reserve. In Paris the birds of night look at each other with friendly interest, in London with mistrust and enmity.

The Babe was in an expansive mood, and like Byron, he bitterly lamented his own loneliness in the crowd.

“Here am I,” he said, “a young man of pleasing manner, and amiable disposition, and I feel like a solitary wayfarer in the desert of Sahara. When the four men in the New Arabian Nights left Prince Florizel’s smoking divan, and plunged into the roaring streets, they were engulfed by strange adventures before they had gone a hundred yards. The Lady of the Superfluous Mansion annexed one, the Fair Cuban another, the man with the chin beard a third. What could be more delightful? And yet I might walk the streets till the crack of doom, and the archangels would have to send me home at the last, still adventureless.”

“Poor Babe,” said Reggie, “but perhaps every one else is in the same plight; perhaps they are all longing for you to speak to them.”

“I don’t think so,” said the Babe, “they seem to me supremely indifferent as to whether I speak to them or not. What are we to do, Reggie? The night is yet young, but we are growing old. I think a little supper, four or five dozen native lobsters, as Mrs. Nickleby suggested, would not hurt us. I hear that there is a most commodious restaurant at the Savoy Hotel. It would be well to be certain on that point. We are walking in the wrong direction but we will do so no longer. Let us take a hansom. Nothing will happen to us. But we will give this wicked world one more chance. We will walk back across Leicester Square. It is supposed to be the fountain-head of all adventures, and the home of all adventurers. We will loiter there a few moments.”

“What sort of adventures do you want, Babe?” asked Reggie.

“Why that’s exactly what I couldn’t tell you,” said the Babe, “the point of an adventure is that it is absolutely unexpected. If I could tell you what I wanted, it would cease to be unexpected, and therefore cease to be an adventure. If you know what you are going to do, it is no adventure. But it’s no use: unexpected things never happen. We will take a cab and eat oysters. Perhaps the oysters will be stale, and if so, it will be a kind of adventure, for they are invariably fresh at the Savoy.”

The Babe selected a table in the balcony opening out of the restaurant; below they could see the long gaslit line of embankment curving gently towards Westminster, and the river flowing turbidly out with the ebbing tide. In the middle distance the bridge of Charing Cross with one great electric lamp high in the air, crossed to the Surrey side, and every now and then a train shrieked across under the glass arch of the station. In the street below there jingled by, from time to time, a hansom, noiseless except for the bell, and the sharp-cut ring of the horse’s hoofs. A party of shrill-voiced Americans took a table near them, and discussed the relative merits of English and American cars, with passionate partisanship. There were of course no oysters to be had, as it was June, and native devilled kidneys had to take their place. Tired-looking waiters flitted noiselessly about, and the Babe’s face caught from the kidneys a livelier animation.

“To-morrow,” he said, “we will go even unto the Oval, and watch the gentlemen and players. It is strange that to play cricket is the most doleful of human pursuits, and to watch it one of the most delightful. When I grow up I shall keep twenty-two men who shall play cricket before me, as Salome danced before Herod. They shall play a perpetual match, which shall never come to a world without end. Amen. Have some more kidneys, Reggie? A few of our small kidneys would not hurt you. Waiter, bring some more kidneys. Kidneys are not attractive to the eye, but the proof of them is in the eating. I eat them because they are so comfortable, as the Psalmist says. By the way, has Sir John Lubbock put the eating of kidneys among his Pleasures of Life? I shall write a book called The Sorrows of Death as a companion volume.”

“Do; and have it set to music by Mendelssohn.”

“Mendelssohn is dead, and the kidneys are dead,” said the profane Babe. “Hullo there’s Stewart. He looks like a man out of the Yellow Book by Aubrey Beardsley. I wish I could look as if Aubrey Beardsley had drawn me; shall I ask him to supper, Reggie? I wonder what he’s doing at the Savoy?”

But Mr. Stewart had got a Cabinet Minister in hand just for the present, and it was half an hour or so before he joined them; even then it took him ten minutes to get through the amiability of Cabinet Ministers, before descending to more sublunary topics. But when he descended, as the Babe said afterwards, he came down with a run, and talked about music-halls and other things.

He was most sympathetic with the Babe’s misfortune in being unable to stop up for May week, and inveighed against the government and management of the University generally.

“It is incredible to me,” he said, “perfectly incredible that so much pedantry and narrowness can be compressed into so small a place. There is not a single one of my colleagues whom I could call a man of the world. I was saying just now to my dear friend Abbotsbury who has been very strongly urging me to stand for Cambridge in Parliament, that I am really quite unfit, perfectly unfit to represent the University. I know nothing whatever about my colleagues, and I disapprove of all I know of them. Take your own case. You are of years of discretion, my dear Babe, and if you choose to dress in a tablecloth, no one has any right to prevent you. They wouldn’t have any right to stop you if you chose to dress in two—less right in fact. I’m sure you looked charming in a tablecloth. Why should the Dean of your college exercise jurisdiction over your dress? He is no Prince Regent. For he dresses himself in a cake hat and a tail coat, which is perhaps the least becoming style of dress which can be conceived. Yet he isn’t sent down for it. Why should he be allowed to make the Great Court of Trinity hideous, and you be sent down for—for making it beautiful?”

“The Babe did a skirt dance down Malcolm Street,” remarked Reggie, “and it was a windy night.”

“Well, the Babe isn’t to blame if it is a windy night,” said Mr. Stewart. “They had probably been praying for wind in St. Mary’s, though the only time in my life that I attended a University sermon there was plenty of wind. The sermon was preached by a black missionary, who I think said he came from Iceland, which I don’t believe. He literally swept us away in a hurricane of inconsequent appeal. Really to assume that the Babe is responsible for the wind, is almost profanity. What a delicious night! It quite makes me think of the feasts of Tiberius at Capri. The air is as soft as the air of Naples and all the waiters here, as at Capri, are made in Germany. Germany itself, I believe, is getting gradually depopulated, and I ‘m sure I don’t wonder. Yes, I am staying here for a day or two. There is an expensive simplicity about the Savoy, which almost lets me forget for the time the pompous cheapness both literal and literary of University towns. Oxford is no better. Dons think about croquet and Triposes at Cambridge, and about Moderations and lawn tennis at Oxford. It is six of one and five and a half of the other. And the cuisine of the college kitchens is enough to make Savarin turn in his grave. You order melted butter, and they bring forth milk in a crockery dish.”

“I thought you were devoted to Cambridge,” said Reggie. “I’m sure I’ve heard you say so.”

“Dear Reggie, let me ask you never to remember anything I say. But it is true that I am devoted to what I consider to be the raison d’Être of Cambridge, that is the undergraduates, with their fresh bright lives, and their insouciance, their costumes of tablecloths and their frank contempt for the class to which I have the misfortune to belong. That is why I always go up in the Long, dons for the time are in eclipse: it is like a whole holiday. I am going there next week, to stop for a month or so. I hope you are both coming.”

“Yes,” said the Babe, “we are both going up to work. I am to go in for a tripos in history instead of a pass. I had a short and painful interview with my father about it. Why are fathers so curt? Do you suppose I shall get through?”

“A tripos,” remarked Mr. Stewart, “is a form of self-mutilation. To go in for a tripos, if you are not by nature tripical, if I may coin a word, and I may tell you that it is to your credit that you are not, my dear Babe, implies a sacrifice of other branches of your nature. Why cannot fathers be content to let their sons be, and not do? No one yet has ever been able to tell me of any good thing that comes out of triposes, except that it keeps the Examiners to their rooms for three weeks afterwards. But they come out like pigmies refreshed with small beer, and talk about quadratic calculus and deliberative genitives with redoubled vigour. The test which triposes apply discovers whether the candidates are possessed of a little knowledge, and so are dangerous things. If they helped them to realise the beauty of ancient Athens, or the picturesqueness of the French Revolution, it would be a different matter and I, as I understood Longridge to do the other day at a College meeting, should advocate having a tripos once a week and twice on Sundays. But all they do is to instil into the minds of the undergraduates a confused and it may be an incorrect idea, that all Athenians were as great a bore as Thucydides and spoke as bad Greek, and that there is a grave doubt whether, after all, Marie Antoinette died by the guillotine, and was not carried off by an attack of acute old age at the age of eighty-seven. Even if it was so, and it is far from certain, why tell any one about it? History rightly considered is a great and wonderful romance, and the methods employed at places of education is to render sterile all the germs of romance it contains, and condense the residue of facts into the smallest possible compass, and Mr. Stanley Weyman then proceeds to write reliable blue books about them, which his publisher libellously advertises as “New Novels,” though they are neither new nor novel. One of my colleagues just before the tripos, circulated among his pupils a half-sheet of paper, not very closely printed. But that infernal half-sheet contained all the procedure of the Athenian law courts, and if learned by heart, quite unintelligently, as he recommended, would insure full marks on any question that might be set on the subject. I had the misfortune to be with him when one of his pupils returned from the examination, and he literally danced for joy all over the Combination Room, though he is a stout man, when he saw that three questions out of nine could be completely answered from his repulsive little half-sheet. And the tripos in the face of these revolting details, is called a test of a man’s ability, and goes a long way to win him a Fellowship. You, my dear Babe, are a man of far more liberal education than that lamentable colleague of mine, though, I may say, in answer to your question, that I would only take very long odds if I had to bet on your chance of getting through.”

“I got through my last May’s,” remarked the Babe in self-defence.

“Yes, but without incriminating myself, my dear boy, I must remind you that I looked over at least three of your papers, and the marks I gave you were more for your capability of acquiring romantic and delightful knowledge, and for a certain power of giving plausible and voluminous answers to questions of which it was obvious you knew nothing whatever, than the actual knowledge your papers displayed. However if you come down to little half-sheets of useless and absurd facts, no doubt you will be able to get through, and it is upon that, that I would take only very long odds. From what I know of you, I do not think you will come down to that. I am delighted to hear you are coming up in the Long, and we will read some charming French memoirs together. They are much more amusing, and much more picturesque than Zola’s tedious pictures of the Second Empire. Reggie, you are classical, are you not? Read, mark, and learn the PhÆdrus, and the Symposium. The former you should read on the upper river under a plane tree if possible, the latter after dining wisely and well in your rooms, and you will know more of the essential Greek than all Mackintyre’s horrid little half-sheets could ever teach you.”

“Then do you think the tripos is perfectly useless and valueless?” asked the Babe.

“Absolutely so: and what makes it more ridiculous is that it is not even ornamental. Most useless things have some beauty or charm about them. The tripos alone, as far as I know, has none. I have only done one thing in my life of which I am thoroughly ashamed, and that is that I took a first in my tripos. Mackintyre of course did the same. It is the thing in his life—he was Senior Classic I think—of which he is most proud. However, to do him justice, I believe that of late years what is called the Philatelic Society has usurped most of his leisure time. No, it has nothing to do with telepathy; it means loving things that are a long way off and is specialised to apply to collections of postage stamps. To me the word denotes ‘Distance lends enchantment to the view.’”

The Babe was continuing to eat strawberries with a pensive air while Mr. Stewart spoke, and having finished the dish he looked round plaintively, and Reggie caught his eye.

“You mustn’t eat any more, Babe,” he said, “it’s after twelve, and we’re going out at eight to-morrow, and we have to get back to Prince’s Gate.”

The Babe sighed.

“Mr. Sykes will be waiting up for us,” he said; “I suppose we ought to go. He will lose his beauty-sleep.”