Mrs Bradley had had no voice in the buying. Kitty knew exactly what she wanted, and dragged Mrs Bradley into and out of seven shops before discovering the object of her choice in the eighth.
‘But what’s all this about?’ asked Deborah, pardonably bewildered.
‘Birthday present,’ said Mrs Bradley calmly.
‘But — I can’t — you can’t give me a birthday present!’
‘Oh, yes, I can. You’re nearly a member of the family,’ replied Mrs Bradley, sitting down and watching the kneeling Kitty.
Kitty got up.
‘You’ll have to put your evening shoes on,’ she said. ‘I can’t see what anything looks like in those slippers. Where are they? I’ll get them… Ah, that’s it. Now see how it goes when you walk… Have a look at yourself in the long glass.’
She sat back on her heels, looked at Mrs Bradley and lifted her eyebrows.
‘Thank you, child,’ said Mrs Bradley.
Jonathan, meanwhile, had established himself solidly with both students and staff at the College. Athelstan, in fact, was the envy of every other Hall, not even excluding Columba, for having, as Miss Cartwright put it, an eligible male on the premises.
‘But he isn’t eligible. The Deb.’s hooked him,’ observed Laura, with neither gracefulness nor truth. Alice pointed this out by contradicting her immediately.
‘She didn’t hook him! What a thing to say!’
‘All right. All right. No offence. I merely intended to convey that his eligibility is all washed up and disconnected,’ replied the heckled one, scrubbing dirt out of an abrasion on her left shin with her tooth brush. ‘Some golfing fiend in the Second Eleven took a slap at me in a practice game this afternoon,’ she explained, when the others expostulated with her on the score of her activity. ’I must get the dirt out. I might get blood-poisoning.’
‘Not as likely as you’ll get it from that germy object,’ said Alice, trying to remove the tooth brush by main force from Laura’s grasp.
‘Look out, ass! You’ll break the handle. Leave me alone. I’m nearly through,’ said the surgeon, returning undeterred to her scrubbing. ‘Wonder when old Kitty will be back? The old scout is losing all the fun of being in a Mixed Hall, isn’t she?’
Jonathan enjoyed himself. He was not in the least bashful, took all his meals, including breakfast and tea, in public, under the eyes and on the tongues of forty interested girls who made inventories and laid bets respecting his likes and dislikes in the matter of food, was supplied with manly bottles of beer by Bella, to whom he made love in the kitchen, made idiotic and extremely well-camouflaged advances to Deborah, and was snubbed firmly, this to the indignation of Miss Cartwright, who had conceived a violent passion for the young man and talked openly in Hall of Deborah’s coldness and of how he must be breaking his heart in secret, to which challenging gambit Laura unhesitatingly, unanswerably and very coarsely replied.
On the night of the dance there was much speculation as to how he would be dressed. Jonathan had received definite instructions from his aunt on this point, and appeared, ‘white tie perfectly rendered’ as Laura observed to her circle, in tails and with his hair brushed.
‘All my own work,’ said Kitty, pleased with the murmurs of admiration which greeted his appearance, first in Hall and then on the dance floor. ‘I fluttered that butterfly tie of his with these two hands. But you wait till you see the Deb.’
‘Girls,’ she added, later, coming up to Laura and Alice just before the young gentlemen arrived from Wattsdown, ‘he’s asked me for my programme, and I’m having two with him, one in each half.’
‘You lucky thing!’ said Miss Cartwright. ‘Never mind, I bet I get him at least twice in a Paul Jones.’
‘I bet she does, too,’ said Laura, grinning. The entrance of the Wattsdown contingent, fingering their ties and otherwise preparing themselves for the fray, ended the conversation and gave rise to other, although not dissimilar, interests.
Miss Crossley sat with Mrs Bradley during a waltz and the foxtrot that followed it, and confessed that she felt very nervous.
‘Oh, you mustn’t do that. Don’t think about ten o’clock and after. I can scarcely recognize some of the students. Who is the dark girl in green, with gold shoes?’
‘That is Miss Milper, of Edmund,’ replied Miss Crossley. ‘I don’t suppose you would notice her in the ordinary way. She is what I call one of the two-year brigade.’
‘And by that you mean…?’
‘Well, she’s engaged now, and she will be married in two years’ time, I imagine. Then good-bye to all the time and trouble spent on her training. Now your Miss Mathers is the type I like — honest, downright, capable — ’
‘Yes, a pleasant, sensible creature,’ said Mrs Bradley, devoutly hoping that Miss Mathers was going to live up to that description later on in the evening.
‘Who’s the old girl like a lizard?’ inquired a vacant-looking Wattsdown youth of Laura.
‘Mrs Lestrange Bradley, the criminologist.’
‘What? Been having a crime wave at Cartaret?’
‘No, mutt. Psychology. Besides, she’s our Warden at Athelstan.’
‘Oh? I say, who is the girl over there? You might introduce me. Is she a Senior? — Third-Year, or something?’
‘That, pet, is our Sub-Warden. She bites. And I won’t introduce you. She wouldn’t like you. You’re not her type in the least.’
‘Judging by the bloke she’s talking to now — the Heathcliff specimen’, I mean — I should say you might be right. Who’s he?’
‘Her fiancé.’
‘Oh? Oh, really? Oh, I see.’ He dropped the subject, but a good many enterprising young gentlemen insisted upon being introduced and Deborah danced every dance in the first half except for two which she sat out with Jonathan, sedately, in full view of one and all.
Jonathan, finding himself paired with Miss Cartwright in a foxtrot during a Paul Jones, had time to tell her that there was something he wanted to ask her.
‘To settle a bet,’ he began; but the music changed before he could put the point, and he was not surprised when she flagrantly grabbed him the next time and said:
‘Go on. To settle a bet?’
‘Those snakes in that Demonstration lesson. Did you…?’
‘Yes, of course. But I daren’t confess to it because my record’s so rocky. How did you…?’ But the music separated them again.
Jonathan, to the joy of Athelstan, had the next dance with his aunt.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You were right about the snakes. She did it. She’s just told me. Don’t give me away for telling you, but I thought you’d like to be certain.’
‘Thank you very much, child. That clears away all doubt. A pity the little silly didn’t own up sooner.’
‘Still, your argument that it couldn’t have been part and parcel of the other works of art was perfectly sound. Who else ought I to dance with? I’ve done Miss du Mugne, Miss Butts, Miss Crossley, Miss Topas, Miss Harbottle and now you.’
Mrs Bradley took him off at the end of the dance to ‘team him up’ as Miss Cartwright disgustedly expressed it, with more of the staff, and half past nine seemed to come along very soon. Mrs Bradley, Miss du Mugne, Miss Topas, Miss Crossley, Jonathan and Deborah shared one of the small tables in the Demonstration Room, which had been turned into a refectory. The Science Room, the two Education Rooms, and the Students’ Common Room had been similarly treated, and parties sitting out on the stairs were ‘also a feature’, as Kitty gracefully and tactfully remarked.