The yard, or college-precinct, is traversed by a number
of straight little paths, over which, at certain hours of the day, a
thousand undergraduates, with books under their arm and youth in their
step, flit from one school to another. Verena Tarrant knew her way
round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had
taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom,
walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought
several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular
structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon
sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of
flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of
scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a
tradition, an antiquity. "This is the place where I ought to have been,"
he said to his charming guide. "I should have had a good time if I had
been able to study here."
"Yes; I presume you feel yourself drawn to any place where ancient
prejudices are garnered up," she answered, not without archness. "I know
by the stand you take about our cause that you share the superstitions
of the old bookmen. You ought to have been at one of those really
mediaeval universities that we saw on the other side, at Oxford, or
Goettingen, or Padua. You would have been in perfect sympathy with their
spirit."
"Well, I don't know much about those old haunts," Ransom rejoined.
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