Yet
everybody in Jex's house called him Jex; and when you looked at that
delightful old gentleman himself with his criss-cross white tie and
curly white hair, you realized how impossible it was for him to be
called anything else except Jex.
For the first time since Mark, brooding upon the moonlit quadrangle of
St. Osmund's Hall, bade farewell to Oxford, he regretted for a while his
surrender of the scholarship to Emmett. What was Emmett doing now? Had
his stammer improved in the confidence that his success must surely have
brought him? Mark made an excuse to forsake the company of the four or
five men in whose charge he had been left. He was tired of being
continually rescued from drowning in their conversation. Their
intentional courtesy galled him. He felt like a negro chief being shown
the sights of England by a tired equerry. It was a fine summer day, and
he went down to the playing fields to watch the cricket match. He sat
down in the shade of an oak tree on the unfrequented side, unable in the
mood he was in to ask against whom the College was playing or which side
was in. Players and spectators alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the
sunlight; the very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than
a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds.
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