o miss it.

A man in a scholar's gown hurried across the quadrangle, rushed up a
staircase, and came back with a note-book in his hand. The Warden came
out of his house and stood upon his doorstep as if he was trying to
remember what he wanted to do. Then he turned round and went into the
house again. Miss Davenport, the Warden's sister, a lady who was
reported to be talkative and in love, came out and observed the
weather. Two minutes afterwards she appeared in a mackintosh, which
was thoroughly business-like. She was most obviously bent on shopping.
Two men, regardless of the rain, strolled out of the front quadrangle
and shouted for Dennison, who did not come to his window. I told them
that he was probably in bed, and they answered that I should fall over
if I did not look out. It was all most painfully dull, and I was just
going in when the Subby appeared and went into the Warden's house. I
could guess the reason for that visit, and waited to see no more. I
sat down by the fire and tried to think out what I should say to the
Subby, and what he would say to me. I did not know much about him
except that his name was Webster, and that he was a great authority on
Etruscan pottery, facts which did not help me much. He also had one of
the finest stamp collections in the world, but I had never collected
anything for more than a week at a time. I felt that he was a
difficult man to gauge, because he had never been what I considered a
sportsman. His appearance at any rate was not imposing, and I was
depressed enough to feel thankful for very small mercies. If dons only
remembered what men feel like after their first wine, they would
scarcely be hard-hearted enough to inflict further penalties upon them.
But it was the vocation of the Subby to keep order in the college, and
some one had told me that rowdy men were his pet abomination. He
regarded St. Cuthbert's as the intellectual centre of Oxford, and
Oxford as the intellectual centre of the world. No wonder the poor man
looked serious and seldom smiled, for he must have had a lot to think
about. He covered up his eyes with enormous spectacles, and the lower
part of his face with a straggling moustache and beard, you got neither
satisfaction nor information from looking at him.

It was nearly twelve o'clock before I saw any of the men who had been
at the wine, and then Ward and Collier came into my rooms. I was still
sitting by the fire, and Ward, who woul