Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

that?”
    “My cigarette-case,” said Harriet. “I thought I’d lost it. I remember now. I hadn’t a pocket yesterday, so I shoved it into the sleeve of my gown. After all, that’s what these sleeves are for, aren’t they?”
    “Oh, my dear! Mine are always a perfect dirty-clothes bag by the end of term. When I have absolutely no clean handkerchiefs left in the drawer my scout turns out my gown sleeves. My best collection worked out at twenty two—but then I’d had a bad cold one week. Dreadful insanitary garment. Here’s your cap. Never mind taking your hood—you can come back here for it. What have you been doing today?—I’ve scarcely seen you.”
    Again Harriet felt an impulse to mention the unpleasant drawing, but again she refrained. She felt she was getting rather unbalanced about it. Why think about it at all? She mentioned her conversation with Miss Hillyard
    “Lor’!” said the Dean. “That’s Miss Hillyard’s hobby-horse. Rubbidge, as Mrs. Gamp would say. Of course men don’t like having their poor little noses put out of joint—who does? I think it’s perfectly noble of them to let us come trampling over their University at all, bless their hearts. They’ve been used to being lords and masters for hundreds of years and they want a bit of time to get used to the change. Why, it takes a man months and months to reconcile himself to a new hat. And just when you’re preparing to send it to the jumble sale, he says. ‘That’s rather a nice hat you’ve got on, where did you get it?’ And you say, ‘My dear Henry, it’s the one I had last year and you said made me look like an organ-grinder’s monkey.’ My brother-in-law says that every time, and it does make my sister so wild.”
    They mounted the steps of the chapel.
     
    It had not, after all, been so bad. Definitely not so bad as one had expected. Though it was melancholy to find that one had grown out of Mary Stokes, and a little tiresome, in a way, that Mary Stokes refused to recognise the fact. Harriet had long ago discovered that one could not like people any the better, merely because they were ill, or dead—still less because one had once liked them very much. Some happy souls could go through life without making this discovery, and they were the men and women who were called “sincere.” Still, there remained old friends whom one was glad to meet again, like the Dean and Phoebe Tucker. And really, everybody had been quite extraordinarily decent. Rather inquisitive and silly about “the man Wimsey,” some of them, but no doubt with the best intentions. Miss Hillyard might be an exception, but there had always been something a little twisted and uncomfortable about Miss Hillyard.
    As the car wound its way over the Chilterns, Harriet grinned to herself, thinking of her parting conversation with the Dean and Bursar.
    “Be sure and write us a new book soon. And remember, if ever we get a mystery at Shrewsbury we shall call upon you to come and disentangle it.”
    “All right,” said Harriet. “When you find a mangled corpse in the buttery, send me a wire—and be sure you let Miss Barton view the body, and then she won’t so much mind my haling the murderess off to justice.”
    And suppose they actually did find a bloody corpse in the buttery, how surprised they would all be. The glory of a college was that nothing drastic ever happened in it. The most frightful thing that was ever likely to happen was that an undergraduate should “take the wrong turning.” The purloining of a parcel or two by a porter had been enough to throw the whole Senior Common Room into consternation. Bless their hearts, how refreshing and soothing and good they all were, walking beneath their ancient beeches and meditating on on kai me on and the finance of Queen Elizabeth.
    “I’ve broken the ice,” she said aloud, “and the water wasn’t so cold after all. I shall go back, from time to time. I shall go back.” She picked out a pleasant