lence of Rugger. One (Sunday) for the
improvement of the mind. On Sundays he was very seldom good for anything
else.

But in the spring of nineteen-two something stirred in him, something
watched and waited; with a subtle agitation, a vague and delicate
excitement, it exulted and aspired. The sensation, or whatever it was,
had as yet no separate existence of its own. So perfect, in this spring
of nineteen-two, was the harmony of Ransome's being that the pulse of
the unborn thing was one with all his other pulses; it was one,
indistinguishably, with the splendor of life, the madness of running,
and the joy he took in his own remarkable performances on the horizontal
bar. It had the effect of heightening, mysteriously and indescribably,
the joy, the madness, and the splendor. And it was dominant, insistent.
Like some great and unintelligible _motif_ it ran ringing and sounding
through the vast rhythmic tumult of physical energy.

Not for a moment did he connect it with the increasing interest that he
took in the appearance of the Young Ladies of the Poly. Gym. He was not
aware how aware he was of their coming, nor how his heart thumped and
throbbed and his nerves trembled at the tramp, tramp of their feet along
the floor.

For sometimes, it might be twice a year, the young men and the young
women of the Gymnasium met and mingled in a Grand Display.

He was fairly well used to it; and yet he had never got over his
amazement at finding that girls, those things of constitutional and
predestined flabbiness, could do very nearly (though not quite)
everything that he could, leaving him little besides his pre-eminence on
the horizontal bar. And yearly the regiment of girls who could "do
things" at the Poly. increased under his very eyes. Their invasion
disturbed him in his vision of their flabbiness; it rubbed it into him,
the things that they could do.

Not but what he had felt it--he had felt _them_--all about him, outside,
in the streets where they jostled him, and in the world made mostly of
mahogany, the world of counters and of desks, of pens where they too
were herded and shut up and compelled, like him, to toil. Queer things,
girls, for they seemed, incomprehensibly, to like it. Their liking it,
their businesslike assumption of equality, their incessant appearance
(authorized, it is true, by business) at the railings of his pen, the
peculiar disenchanting promiscuity of it all, preserved young Ransome in
his eccent