[Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson]@TWC D-Link bookLay Morals CHAPTER II--THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY 6/17
These men are out of their element in the quadrangle.
Even the small remains of boisterous humour, which still clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a hasty retreat to resume their perfunctory march along Princes Street.
Flirtation is to them a great social duty, a painful obligation, which they perform on every occasion in the same chill official manner, and with the same commonplace advances, the same dogged observance of traditional behaviour.
The shape of their raiment is a burden almost greater than they can bear, and they halt in their walk to preserve the due adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one would fancy he had mixed in a procession of Jacobs.
We speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would as soon associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy modern beaux.
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