Page:Paul Clifford Vol 3.djvu/177

Rh fine, vague visions about virtue. I thought to revive my ancestral honour by being good: in short, I was an embryo King Pepin. I awoke from this dream at the University. There, for the first time, I perceived the real consequence of rank.

"At school, you know, Julia, boys care nothing for a lord. A good cricketer, an excellent fellow, is worth all the earls in the peerage. But at college all that ceases: bats and balls sink into the nothingness in which corals and bells had sunk before. One grows manly, and worships coronets and carriages. I saw it was a fine thing to get a prize, but it was ten times a finer thing to get drunk with a peer. So, when I had done the first, my resolve to be worthy of my sires made me do the second—not indeed exactly; I never got drunk; my father disgusted me with that vice betimes. To his gluttony, I owe my vegetable diet, and to his inebriety my addiction to water. No—I did not get drunk with peers; but I was just as agreeable to them as if I had been equally embruted. I knew intimately all the 'Hats' in the University, and I was henceforth looked up to by 'the Caps,' as if my head had gained the height